Asymptotic spectral efficiency of MIMO multiple-access wireless systems exploring only channel spatial correlations

In this paper, we use the replica method originally developed in statistical physics to investigate the asymptotic sum-rate of a Gaussian antenna-array-based multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiple-access (MA) wireless channel having spatial correlations at both the transmitters and the receiver. Through numerical experiments, the asymptotic solution can consistently produce highly accurate ergodic results for MIMO-MA systems with only a few antenna elements at each transmitter and receiver. This offers the asymptotic solution important practical values in analyzing and designing a MIMO multiple access system that makes best use of the wireless channel structure. Furthermore, with the asymptotic solution, we provide an efficient optimization algorithm to determine the asymptotic optimum transmit signal covariance matrices when only the slow-varying channel spatial covariance information is available.