Asymptotic Mutual Information Statistics of Separately-Correlated Rician Fading MIMO Channels

Precise characterization of the mutual information of MIMO systems is required to assess the throughput of wireless communication channels in the presence of Rician fading and spatial correlation. Here, we present an asymptotic approach allowing to approximate the distribution of the mutual information as a Gaussian distribution in order to provide both the average achievable rate and the outage probability. More precisely, the mean and variance of the mutual information of the separatelycorrelated Rician fading MIMO channel are derived when the number of transmit and receive antennas grows asymptotically large and their ratio approaches a finite constant. The derivation is based on the replica method, an asymptotic technique widely used in theoretical physics and, more recently, in the performance analysis of communication (CDMA and MIMO) systems. The replica method allows to analyze very difficult system cases in a comparatively simple way though some authors pointed out that its assumptions are not always rigorous. Being aware of this, we underline the key assumptions made in this setting, quite similar to the assumptions made in the technical literature using the replica method in their asymptotic analyses. As far as concerns the convergence of the mutual information to the Gaussian distribution, it is shown that it holds under some mild technical conditions, which are tantamount to assuming that the spatial correlation structure has no asymptotically dominant eigenmodes. The accuracy of the asymptotic approach is assessed by providing a sizeable number of numerical results. It is shown that the approximation is very accurate in a wide variety of system settings even when the number of transmit and receive antennas is as small as a few units.Comment: - submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory on Nov. 19, 2006 - revised and submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory on Dec. 19, 200

Living at the Edge: A Large Deviations Approach to the Outage MIMO Capacity

Using a large deviations approach we calculate the probability distribution of the mutual information of MIMO channels in the limit of large antenna numbers. In contrast to previous methods that only focused at the distribution close to its mean (thus obtaining an asymptotically Gaussian distribution), we calculate the full distribution, including its tails which strongly deviate from the Gaussian behavior near the mean. The resulting distribution interpolates seamlessly between the Gaussian approximation for rates $R$ close to the ergodic value of the mutual information and the approach of Zheng and Tse for large signal to noise ratios $\rho$. This calculation provides us with a tool to obtain outage probabilities analytically at any point in the $(R, \rho, N)$ parameter space, as long as the number of antennas $N$ is not too small. In addition, this method also yields the probability distribution of eigenvalues constrained in the subspace where the mutual information per antenna is fixed to $R$ for a given $\rho$. Quite remarkably, this eigenvalue density is of the form of the Marcenko-Pastur distribution with square-root singularities, and it depends on the values of $R$ and $\rho$.Comment: Accepted for publication, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2010). Part of this work appears in the Proc. IEEE Information Theory Workshop, June 2009, Volos, Greec

A CLT for Information-theoretic statistics of Gram random matrices with a given variance profile

Consider a $N\times n$ random matrix $Y_n=(Y_{ij}^{n})$ where the entries are given by $$Y_{ij}^{n}=\frac{\sigma_{ij}(n)}{\sqrt{n}} X_{ij}^{n}$$ the $X_{ij}^{n}$ being centered, independent and identically distributed random variables with unit variance and $(\sigma_{ij}(n); 1\le i\le N, 1\le j\le n)$ being an array of numbers we shall refer to as a variance profile. We study in this article the fluctuations of the random variable $$\log\det(Y_n Y_n^* + \rho I_N)$$ where $Y^*$ is the Hermitian adjoint of $Y$ and $\rho > 0$ is an additional parameter. We prove that when centered and properly rescaled, this random variable satisfies a Central Limit Theorem (CLT) and has a Gaussian limit whose parameters are identified. A complete description of the scaling parameter is given; in particular it is shown that an additional term appears in this parameter in the case where the 4$^\textrm{th}$ moment of the $X_{ij}$'s differs from the 4$^{\textrm{th}}$ moment of a Gaussian random variable. Such a CLT is of interest in the field of wireless communications

On the capacity achieving covariance matrix for Rician MIMO channels: an asymptotic approach

The capacity-achieving input covariance matrices for coherent block-fading correlated MIMO Rician channels are determined. In this case, no closed-form expressions for the eigenvectors of the optimum input covariance matrix are available. An approximation of the average mutual information is evaluated in this paper in the asymptotic regime where the number of transmit and receive antennas converge to $+\infty$. New results related to the accuracy of the corresponding large system approximation are provided. An attractive optimization algorithm of this approximation is proposed and we establish that it yields an effective way to compute the capacity achieving covariance matrix for the average mutual information. Finally, numerical simulation results show that, even for a moderate number of transmit and receive antennas, the new approach provides the same results as direct maximization approaches of the average mutual information, while being much more computationally attractive.Comment: 56 pp. Extended version of the published article in IEEE Inf. Th. (march 2010) with more proof

Optimum Receiver Design for MIMO Fading Channels

This thesis describes the analytical design and the performance analysis of optimum receivers for Multiple Input - Multiple Output (MIMO) fading channels. In particular, a novel Optimum Receiver for separately-correlated MIMO channels is proposed. This novel pilot-aided receiver is able to process jointly the pilot symbols, transmitted within each time frame as a preamble, and the information symbols and to decode the transmitted data in a single step, avoiding the explicit estimation of the channel matrix. The optimum receiver is designed for the following two scenarios, corresponding to different transmission schemes and channel models: 1) Narrowband Rician fading MIMO channel with spatial separate correlation; 2) MIMO-OFDM Rician fading channel with space and frequency separate correlation. For each system the performance of the optimum receiver is studied in detail under different channel conditions. The optimum receiver is compared with: - the ideal Genie Receiver, knowing perfectly the Channel State Information (CSI) at no cost; - the standard Mismatched Receiver, estimating the CSI in a first step, then using this imperfect estimate in the ideal channel metric. Since the optimum receiver requires the knowledge of the channel parameters for the decoding process, an estimation algorithm is proposed and tested. Moreover, a complexity analysis is carried out and methods for complexity reduction are proposed. Furthermore, the narrowband receiver is tested in realistic conditions using measured channel samples. Finally, a blind version of the receiver is propose