Scheduling and Power Allocation Dampens the Negative Effect of Channel Misreporting in Massive MIMO

We study the sensitivity of multi-user scheduling performance to channel magnitude misreporting in systems with massive antennas. We consider the round-robin scheduler combined with max-min and waterfilling power controls, respectively. We show that user scheduling combined with power allocation, in general, dampens the negative effect of channel misreporting compared to the purely physical layer analysis of channel misreporting without scheduling. We discover several interesting results. First, we observe a periodicity in rate-loss behavior as the number of misreporting users increases. Second, we find that the waterfilling power control is more robust to channel misreporting compared with max-min power control. Third, for homogeneous users with equal average signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), channel underreporting is harmful but overreporting is beneficial for max-min power control; the opposite impact is found for waterfilling power control. For heterogeneous users with various average SNRs, however, both underreporting and overreporting harm the system for both power control policies, demonstrating the complex interactions across network layers due to channel misreporting.