Asymptotic performance of linear receivers in network MIMO

We consider the asymptotic performance of a class of linear receivers in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiple access channels (MAC). Under the assumption that the number of transmitters K and the number of receive antennas N grow large at the same rate and that the receiver has only an imperfect estimate of the channel matrix, we derive deterministic equivalents for the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) at the receiver output. Since we assume that the channel matrix has a variance profile, i.e., different matrix entries exhibit different variances, the results are useful for the analysis of network MIMO systems where a user terminal (UT) sees a different path loss to different cooperative base stations (BSs). Our simulation results show that the asymptotic performance predictions are accurate for even small values of N and K.