Asymptotic Analysis of MIMO Wireless Systems With Spatial Correlation at the Receiver

Asymptotic Analysis of MIMO Wireless Systems With Spatial Correlation at the Receiver With a unified approach, this paper investigates the asymptotic performance, or equivalently, the large-system properties, of various point-to-point systems with antenna-array-based multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels having spatial correlations. Using the replica method originally developed for statistical physics, we provide analytical solutions to the input–output mutual information of MIMO systems at the transmit side, with arbitrary inputs, and at the receive side, with either the optimum space–time joint decoding, or various suboptimum spatial equalizers followed by a bank of temporal decoders. Important physical meanings revealed though the analytical solutions to those more practical combinations, such as how the input–output mutual information is affected by the channel spatial correlations, are highlighted along our derivation. Moreover, we provide a novel waterfilling algorithm to determine the data-rate-maximizing transmit signal covariance matrix when only the channel long-term spatial correlations are available at the transmitter.