Research Article
The Space Frontier: Physical Limits of Multiple Antenna Information Transfer
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/ICST.VALUETOOLS2008.4574, author={Romain Couillet and Sebastian Wagner and M\^{e}rouane Debbah and Alonso Silva}, title={The Space Frontier: Physical Limits of Multiple Antenna Information Transfer}, proceedings={3rd International ICST Workshop on Interdisciplinary Systems Approach in Performance Evaluation and Design of Computer \& Communication Systems}, publisher={ACM}, proceedings_a={INTER-PERF}, year={2010}, month={5}, keywords={MIMO capacity broadcast spatial correlation}, doi={10.4108/ICST.VALUETOOLS2008.4574} }- Romain Couillet
Sebastian Wagner
Mérouane Debbah
Alonso Silva
Year: 2010
The Space Frontier: Physical Limits of Multiple Antenna Information Transfer
INTER-PERF
ICST
DOI: 10.4108/ICST.VALUETOOLS2008.4574
Abstract
In this paper, we study the capacity limits of dense multi-antenna 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 of the channel, while the capacity saturates in the absence of channel knowledge at the transmitter. We provide numerical results supporting the theoretical derivations.