Systems and methods for improving the performance of a MIMO wireless communication system by reducing the amount of uplink resources that are needed to provide channel performance feedback for the adjustment of data rates on the downlink MIMO channels. In one embodiment, a method comprises encoding each of a set of data streams according to corresponding data rates, permuting the data streams on a set of MIMO channels according to a full permutation of combinations, transmitting the permuted data streams, receiving the permuted data streams, decoding and determining an SNR for each of the data streams, computing a condensed SNR metric for the set of data streams, providing the condensed metric as feedback, determining a set of individual SNR metrics for the data streams based on the condensed SNR metric, and adjusting the data rates at which the data streams are encoded based on the individual SNR metrics.