An overview of large system analysis for multi-input/multi-output channels

Large system analysis has been used extensively in recent years to evaluate the performance of code division-multiple access (CDMA) and multi-input/multi-output (MIMO) communications systems. A key feature of this analysis is application of results on eigenvalue distributions and moments of large random matrices. These results enable the efficient computation of large system performance measures, such as spectral efficiency and probability of error, which are far more difficult to compute for finite-size systems. The large system results typically give an accurate prediction of the performance of finite-size systems, and offer important insights into system behavior. We give an overview of large system results for some different communications system models. Our emphasis is on techniques used previously by the authors to evaluate the performance of multi-carrier CDMA with the optimal linear receiver.