Spectral Efficiency of Distributed MIMO Cellular Systems in a Composite Fading Channel

In this paper, accurate approximations of the spectral efficiency are presented for co-located multiple-input multiple-output (C-MIMO) and distributed MIMO (D-MIMO) cellular systems in the composite channel model, which includes path loss, shadow fading, and multipath fading. Firstly, conditioned on the desired user position, the analytical approximations of the mean and variance of the mutual information are derived for C-MIMO and D-MIMO at high SNR. Because the exact distribution of the mutual information in a composite Rayleigh- lognormal environment is difficult to analyze, we apply Gaussian approximation to the distribution of the mutual information. Then, the growth in ergodic capacity and outage capacity of a D-MIMO channel with the number of antennas as well as the variance of the shadow fading is well understood. Assuming that the users are randomly distributed in the cell, the closed-form expressions for the mean spectral efficiency and mean outage spectral efficiency are derived. Finally, the numerical results are presented which validate the analytical results.