Channel State Information - Different Kinds of Channel State Information

Different Kinds of Channel State Information

There are basically two levels of CSI, namely instantaneous CSI and statistical CSI.

Instantaneous CSI (or short-term CSI) means that the current channel conditions are known, which can be viewed as knowing the impulse response of a digital filter. This gives an opportunity to adapt the transmitted signal to the impulse response and thereby optimize the received signal for spatial multiplexing or to achieve low bit error rates.

Statistical CSI (or long-term CSI) means that a statistical characterization of the channel is known. This description can include, for example, the type of fading distribution, the average channel gain, the line-of-sight component, and the spatial correlation. As with instantaneous CSI, this information can be used for transmission optimization.

The CSI acquisition is practically limited by how fast the channel conditions are changing. In fast fading systems where channel conditions vary rapidly under the transmission of a single information symbol, only statistical CSI is reasonable. On the other hand, in slow fading systems instantaneous CSI can be estimated with reasonable accuracy and used for transmission adaptation for some time before being outdated.

In practical systems, the available CSI often lies in between these two levels; instantaneous CSI with some estimation/quantization error is combined with statistical information.