Fundamental Limits in MIMO Broadcast Channels

This paper studies the fundamental limits of MIMO broadcast channels from a high level, determining the sum-rate capacity of the system as a function of system paramaters, such as the number of transmit antennas, the number of users, the number of receive antennas, and the total transmit power. The crucial role of channel state information at the transmitter is emphasized, as well as the emergence of opportunistic transmission schemes. The effects of channel estimation errors, training, and spatial correlation are studied, as well as issues related to fairness, delay and differentiated rate scheduling

On the capacity of MIMO broadcast channels with partial side information

In multiple-antenna broadcast channels, unlike point-to-point multiple-antenna channels, the multiuser capacity depends heavily on whether the transmitter knows the channel coefficients to each user. For instance, in a Gaussian broadcast channel with M transmit antennas and n single-antenna users, the sum rate capacity scales like Mloglogn for large n if perfect channel state information (CSI) is available at the transmitter, yet only logarithmically with M if it is not. In systems with large n, obtaining full CSI from all users may not be feasible. Since lack of CSI does not lead to multiuser gains, it is therefore of interest to investigate transmission schemes that employ only partial CSI. We propose a scheme that constructs M random beams and that transmits information to the users with the highest signal-to-noise-plus-interference ratios (SINRs), which can be made available to the transmitter with very little feedback. For fixed M and n increasing, the throughput of our scheme scales as MloglognN, where N is the number of receive antennas of each user. This is precisely the same scaling obtained with perfect CSI using dirty paper coding. We furthermore show that a linear increase in throughput with M can be obtained provided that M does not not grow faster than logn. We also study the fairness of our scheduling in a heterogeneous network and show that, when M is large enough, the system becomes interference dominated and the probability of transmitting to any user converges to 1/n, irrespective of its path loss. In fact, using M=αlogn transmit antennas emerges as a desirable operating point, both in terms of providing linear scaling of the throughput with M as well as in guaranteeing fairness

How much does transmit correlation affect the sum-rate scaling of MIMO Gaussian broadcast channels?

This paper considers the effect of spatial correlation between transmit antennas on the sum-rate capacity of the MIMO Gaussian broadcast channel (i.e., downlink of a cellular system). Specifically, for a system with a large number of users n, we analyze the scaling laws of the sum-rate for the dirty paper coding and for different types of beamforming transmission schemes. When the channel is i.i.d., it has been shown that for large n, the sum rate is equal to M log log n + M log P/M + o(1) where M is the number of transmit antennas, P is the average signal to noise ratio, and o(1) refers to terms that go to zero as n → ∞. When the channel exhibits some spatial correlation with a covariance matrix R (non-singular with tr(R) = M), we prove that the sum rate of dirty paper coding is M log log n + M log P/M + log det(R) + o(1). We further show that the sum-rate of various beamforming schemes achieves M log log n + M log P/M + M log c + o(1) where c ≤ 1 depends on the type of beamforming. We can in fact compute c for random beamforming proposed in and more generally, for random beamforming with preceding in which beams are pre-multiplied by a fixed matrix. Simulation results are presented at the end of the paper

Principles of Physical Layer Security in Multiuser Wireless Networks: A Survey

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of physical-layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers without relying on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access, interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered. Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical-layer message authentication is also introduced briefly. The survey concludes with observations on potential research directions in this area.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, 303 refs. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1303.1609 by other authors. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 201

On the Capacity of a Class of MIMO Cognitive Radios

Cognitive radios have been studied recently as a means to utilize spectrum in a more efficient manner. This paper focuses on the fundamental limits of operation of a MIMO cognitive radio network with a single licensed user and a single cognitive user. The channel setting is equivalent to an interference channel with degraded message sets (with the cognitive user having access to the licensed user's message). An achievable region and an outer bound is derived for such a network setting. It is shown that under certain conditions, the achievable region is optimal for a portion of the capacity region that includes sum capacity.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, Accepted for publication in Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (JSTSP) - Special Issue on Dynamic Spectrum Acces

Eigen-Based Transceivers for the MIMO Broadcast Channel with Semi-Orthogonal User Selection

This paper studies the sum rate performance of two low complexity eigenmode-based transmission techniques for the MIMO broadcast channel, employing greedy semi-orthogonal user selection (SUS). The first approach, termed ZFDPC-SUS, is based on zero-forcing dirty paper coding; the second approach, termed ZFBF-SUS, is based on zero-forcing beamforming. We first employ new analytical methods to prove that as the number of users K grows large, the ZFDPC-SUS approach can achieve the optimal sum rate scaling of the MIMO broadcast channel. We also prove that the average sum rates of both techniques converge to the average sum capacity of the MIMO broadcast channel for large K. In addition to the asymptotic analysis, we investigate the sum rates achieved by ZFDPC-SUS and ZFBF-SUS for finite K, and show that ZFDPC-SUS has significant performance advantages. Our results also provide key insights into the benefit of multiple receive antennas, and the effect of the SUS algorithm. In particular, we show that whilst multiple receive antennas only improves the asymptotic sum rate scaling via the second-order behavior of the multi-user diversity gain; for finite K, the benefit can be very significant. We also show the interesting result that the semi-orthogonality constraint imposed by SUS, whilst facilitating a very low complexity user selection procedure, asymptotically does not reduce the multi-user diversity gain in either first (log K) or second-order (loglog K) terms.Comment: 35 pages, 3 figures, to appear in IEEE transactions on signal processin