The Multicell Processing Capacity of the Cellular MIMO Uplink Channel under Correlated Fading

Abstract

In the information-theoretic literature, it has been widely shown that multicell processing is able to provide high capacity gains in the context of cellular systems and that the per-cell sum-rate capacity of multicell processing systems grows linearly with the number of Base Station (BS) receive antennas. However, the majority of results in this area has been produced assuming that the fading coefficients of the MIMO subchannels are totally uncorrelated. In this direction, this paper investigates the ergodic per-cell sum-rate capacity of the MIMO Cellular Multiple-Access Channel under correlated fading and multicell processing. More specifically, the current channel model considers Rayleigh fading, uniformly distributed User Terminals (UTs) over a planar cellular system and power-law path loss. Furthermore, both BSs and Uts are equipped with correlated multiple antennas, which are modelled according to the Kronecker model. The per-cell sum-rate capacity closed form is derived using a Free Probability approach and numerical results are produced by varying the cell density of the system, as well as the level of correlation.