Capacity scaling and spectral efficiency in wide-band correlated MIMO channels
The dramatic linear increase in ergodic capacity with the number of antennas promised by multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems is based on idealized channel models representing a,rich scattering environment. Is such scaling sustainable in realistic scattering scenarios? Existing physical models, although realistic, are intractable for addressing this problem Analytically due to their complicated nonlinear dependence on propagation path parameters, such as the angles of arrival and delays. In this paper, we leverage a recently introduced virtual representation of physical models that is essentially a Fourier series representation of wide-band MIMO channels in terms of fixed virtual angles and delays. Motivated by physical considerations, we propose a D-connected model for correlated channels defined by a virtual spatial channel matrix consisting of D nonvanishing diagonals with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) Gaussian entries. The parameter D provides a meaningful and tractable measure of the richness of scattering. We derive general bounds for the coherent ergodic capacity and investigate capacity scaling with the number of antennas and bandwidth. In the large antenna regime, we show that linear capacity scaling is possible if D scales linearly with the number of antennas. This, in turn, is possible if the number of resolvable paths grows quadratically with the number of antennas. The capacity saturates for linear growth in the number of paths (fixed D). The ergodic capacity does not depend on frequency selectivity of the channel in the wide-band case. Increasing bandwidth tightens the bounds and hastens the convergence of scaling behavior. For large bandwidth, the capacity scales linearly with the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as well. We also provide an explicit characterization of the wide-band slope recently proposed by Verdu. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the key theoretical results.
spectral efficiency ergodic capacity scattering fourier series frequency selectivity beamforming empirical eigenvalue distribution ray tracing