Optimal transmission strategies and impact of correlation in multiantenna systems with different types of channel state information

We study the optimal transmission strategy of a multiple-input single-output (MISO) wireless communication link. The receiver has perfect channel state information (CSI), while the transmitter has different types of CSI, i.e., either perfect CSI, or no CSI, or long-term knowledge of the channel covariance matrix. For the case in which the transmitter knows the channel covariance matrix, it was recently shown that the optimal eigenvectors of the transmit covariance matrix correspond with the eigenvectors of the channel covariance matrix. However, the optimal eigenvalues are difficult to compute. We derive a characterization of the optimum power allocation. Furthermore, we apply this result to provide an efficient algorithm which computes the optimum power allocation. In addition to this, we analyze the impact of correlation on the ergodic capacity of the MISO system with different CSI schemes. At first, we justify the belief that equal power allocation is optimal if the transmitter is uninformed and the transmit antennas are correlated. Next, we show that the ergodic capacity with perfect CSI and without CSI at the transmitter is Schur-concave, i.e., the more correlated the transmit antennas are, the less capacity is achievable. In addition, we show that the ergodic capacity with covariance knowledge at the transmitter is Schur-convex with respect to the correlation properties. These results completely characterize the impact of correlation on the ergodic capacity in MISO systems. Furthermore, the capacity loss or gain due to correlation is quantified. For no CSI and perfect CSI at the transmitter, the capacity loss due to correlation is bounded by some small constant, whereas the capacity gain due to correlation grows unbounded with the number of transmit antennas in the case in which transmitter knows the channel covariance matrix. Finally, we illustrate all theoretical results by numerical simulations.