On the capacity of multiuser wireless channels with multiple antennas

In this paper, the advantages of multiuser communication, where many users are allowed to simultaneously transmit or receive in a common bandwidth, are considered for multiple-antenna systems in a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Assuming channel state information at receiver (CSIR) to be available, the ergodic capacity is characterized for both unbiased and biased channels, and the quantitative capacity gain of a multiple-antenna multiuser system is analyzed for multiple-access channels. For highly biased (correlated) channels, a multiuser system is shown to be inherently superior to a single-user system (a time- or frequency-division multiple-access (TDMA or FDMA) based system) due to the underlying multiuser diversity, and the sum capacity is shown to scale linearly with the number of antennas. For unbiased channels, the characteristics of ergodic capacity are shown to transfer to outage capacity when a large degree of space diversity exists, and to deterministic capacity when the number of receive antennas is large. Also, a brief discussion on the multiuser multiple-antenna communication in broadcast channel is provided.