Capacity of a mobile multiple-antenna wireless link with isotropically random Rician fading

We analyze the capacity of a multiple-antenna wireless link with M antennas at the transmitter and N antennas at the receiver in a Rician fading channel when the channel is unknown at both the transmitter and the receiver. The Rician model is a nonstandard model with a Rayleigh component and an isotropically random rank-one specular component. The Rayleigh and specular components remain constant for T symbol periods, after which they change to completely independent realizations, and so on. To maximize mutual information over the joint density of T·M complex transmitted signals it is sufficient to maximize over a joint density of min{T,M} real transmitted signal magnitudes. The capacity-achieving signal matrix is equal to the product of two independent matrices, a T×T isotropically random unitary matrix and a T×M real nonnegative diagonal matrix. If M>T, optimum signaling uses only T out of the M transmit antennas. We derive a novel lower bound on capacity which enables us to compute achievable rate regions for many cases. This lower bound is also valid for the case of purely Rayleigh-fading channels, where it has not been feasible, in general, to compute capacity, or mutual information. Our numerical results also indicate that the Rayleigh model is surprisingly robust: under our Rician model, up to half of the received energy can arrive via the specular component without significant reduction in capacity compared with the purely Rayleigh case.