Capacity Limits and Multiplexing Gains of MIMO Channels with Transceiver Impairments

Author

Bjornson, Emil ; Zetterberg, Per ; Bengtsson, Martin ; Ottersten, Bjorn

Author_Institution

ACCESS Linnaeus Center, KTH R. Inst. of Technol., Stockholm, Sweden

Volume

17

Issue

1

fYear

2013

fDate

Jan-13

Firstpage

91

Lastpage

94

Abstract

The capacity of ideal MIMO channels has a high-SNR slope that equals the minimum of the number of transmit and receive antennas. This letter analyzes if this result holds when there are distortions from physical transceiver impairments. We prove analytically that such physical MIMO channels have a finite upper capacity limit, for any channel distribution and SNR. The high-SNR slope thus collapses to zero. This appears discouraging, but we prove the encouraging result that the relative capacity gain of employing MIMO is at least as large as with ideal transceivers.

Keywords

MIMO communication; antenna arrays; channel capacity; multiplexing; radio transceivers; receiving antennas; transmitting antennas; channel distribution; finite upper capacity limit; high-SNR slope; multiplexing gains; physical MIMO channels; physical transceiver impairments; receive antennas; relative capacity gain; transceiver impairments; transmit antennas; Gain; MIMO; Multiplexing; Signal to noise ratio; Transceivers; Transmitters; Upper bound; Channel capacity; high-SNR analysis; multi-antenna communication; transceiver impairments;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Communications Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1089-7798

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/LCOMM.2012.112012.122003

Filename

6362131