THE SPACE FRONTIER: PHYSICAL LIMITS OF MULTIPLE ANTENNA INFORMATION TRANSFER

Romain Couillet (1) , Sebastian Wagner (1) , Merouane Debbah (2) , Alonso Silva (3)

1 NXP Semiconductors
2 SUPELEC-Campus Gif
3 Chaire Radio Flexible - Chaire Radio Flexible Alcatel-Lucent/Supélec

In this paper, we study the capacity limits of dense multiantenna systems. We derive asymptotic capacity expressions for point-to-point and broadcast channels by applying recent tools from random matrix theory. In the case of broadcast channels, we focus on linear precoding techniques. We found that the asymptotic capacity depends only on the ratio between the size of the antenna array and the wavelength. This provides useful guidelines on the achievable limits of information transfer. In particular, it is shown that the total capacity grows unbounded if the transmitter has perfect knowledge on the channel, while the capacity saturates in the absence of channel knowledge at the transmitter. We provide numerical results supporting the theoretical derivations.

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Romain Couillet, Sebastian Wagner, Merouane Debbah, Alonso Silva. THE SPACE FRONTIER: PHYSICAL LIMITS OF MULTIPLE ANTENNA INFORMATION TRANSFER. INTER-PERF 2008: WORKSHOP ON INTERDISCIPLINARY SYSTEMS APPROACH IN PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND DESIGN OF COMPUTER AND COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, Oct 2008, Greece. pp.ACM 978-963-9799-31-8. ⟨hal-00328141⟩