In the downlink illustrated in Figure 1, the received signal at
the
k
th receiver can be written as
y
k
= H
k
x + n
k
for k = 1,... ,U,(2)
where
H
k
∈ C
M
k
×N
represents the downlink channel and
n
k
∈ C
M
k
×1
is the additive Gaussian noise at receiver
k
. We
assume that each receiver also has perfect and instantaneous
knowledge of its own channel
H
k
. The transmitted signal
x
is a
function of the multiple users’ information data, an example of
which takes the superposition form
x =
k
x
k
where
x
k
is the sig-
nal carrying, possibly nonlinearly encoded, user
k
’s message, with
covariance
Q
k
= E(x
k
x
H
k
)
, with
E(·)
the expectation operator.
The power allocated to user
k
is therefore given by
P
k
= Tr(Q
k
)
,
where
Tr
is the trace operator. Under a sum power constraint at
the BS, the power allocation needs to maintain
k
P
k
≤ P
.
Assuming a unit variance for the noise, it is now known that
the capacity region for a given matrix channel realization can be
written as [7]:
C
BC
=
P
1
,..P
U
s.t.
k
P
k
=P
⎧
⎨
⎩
(R
1
,..R
U
) ∈
+U
, R
i
≤ log
2
det
I + H
i
(
j≥i
Q
j
)H
H
i
det
I + H
i
(
j>i
Q
j
)H
H
i
⎫
⎬
⎭
,(3)
where the expression should in turn be optimized over each pos-
sible user ordering. Although difficult to realize in practice, the
computation of the region above is facilitated by exploiting the
so-called duality results between the BC and the much simple to
obtain MAC capacity region, which stipulate that the BC region
can be calculated through the union of regions of the dual MAC
with all uplink power allocation vectors meeting the sum power
constraint
P
[8], [9].
The fundamental role played by the multiple antennas at
either the BS or the users in expanding the channel capacity is
best apprehended by examining how the sum rate (the point
yielded by the maximum
k
R
k
in the capacity region) scales
with the number of active users.
Assuming a block fading channel model and an homoge-
neous network where all users have the same signal-to-noise
ratio (SNR), the scaling law of the sum rate capacity of MIMO
Gaussian BC, denoted as
R
DPC
for
M
k
= M
, fixed
N
and
P
, and
large
U
is given by [10]
lim
U→∞
E(R
DPC
)
N log log(UM)
= 1.(4)
The result in (4) indicates that, with full CSIT, the system can
enjoy a multiplexing gain of
N
, obtained by the BS sending data
to
N
carefully selected users out of
U
. Since each user exhibits
M
independent fading coefficients, the total number of DoF for
multiuser diversity is
UM
, thus giving the extra gain
log log(UM)
.
In contrast with (4), the capacity obtained in a situation
where the BS is deprived from the users’ channel information is
reduced to (in the high SNR regime)
E(R
NoCSIT
) ≈ min(M, N) log SN R.(5)
DESIGN LESSONS
Information theory highlights several fundamental aspects
of MU-MIMO systems, which are in contrast much with the
conventional SU-MIMO setting. First, the results above
advocate for serving multiple users simultaneously in a
SDMA fashion, with a suitably chosen precoding scheme at
the transmitter. Although the multiplexing gain is limited by
the number of transmit antennas, the number of simultane-
ously served users is, in principle, arbitrary. How many and
which users should effectively be served with nonzero power
at any given instant is the problem addressed by the
resource allocation algorithm. Unlike in the single-user set-
ting, the spatial multiplexing of different data streams can
be done while users are equipped with single antenna
receivers, thus enabling the capacity gains of MIMO while
maintaining a low cost for user terminals. Having multiple
antennas at the terminal can thus be viewed as optional
equipment allowing extra diversity gain for certain users or
giving the flexibility toward interference canceling and mul-
tiplexing of several data streams to such users (but reducing
the number of other users served simultaneously). In addi-
tion to yielding MIMO multiplexing gains without the need
for MIMO user terminals, the multiuser setup presents the
advantage of being immune with respect to the possible ill-
behavior of the propagation channel, which often plagues
SU-MIMO communications, i.e., rank loss due to small spac-
ing and/or the presence of strong line-of-sight component
thanks to the wide physical separation between the users.
Finally, also in contrast with the conventional SU-MIMO set-
ting, the multiplexing factor
N
in the downlink comes at the
condition of channel knowledge at the transmitter. In the uplink
this multiplexing gain is more easily extracted because the BS
can be safely assumed to have uplink channel knowledge and
simply implements a classical multiuser receiver to separate the
contributions of the selected users in (1).
[FIG1] Downlink of a multiuser MIMO network. A BS
communicates simultaneously with several multiple antenna
terminals.