Different propagation environments may need different sounding intervals for good performance, so it's hard to find a single sounding interval for all environments. A compromise value may be too long for some environments and too short for others. In both cases, this results in a loss in performance compared to an ideal sounding frequency. Instead of sounding at a regular interval, the AP could also use a threshold on the allowed degradation of the original SINR (i.e. relative to the original channel and precoding matrix).
FIG. 4D shows a situation where the channel information is refreshed when the performance of any one of the users has degraded by more than 3 dB. FIG. 4D shows the SINR for three users as a function of time when the AP sounds the channel based on observed SINR degradation. FIG. 4C shows that it is possible with the current sounding protocol to keep the degradation to within a given range, but at the expense of very frequent channel sounding. Each channel sounding represents protocol overhead that reduces the effective throughput.