Multiple Antennas and Isotropically-Random Inputs: The Received Signal Density in Closed Form


Babak Hassibi    Thomas L. Marzetta


Abstract: An important open problem in multiple antenna communications theory is to compute the capacity of a wireless link subject to flat Rayleigh block-fading, with no channel-state information available either to the transmitter or to the receiver. The isotropically-random (i.r.) unitary matrix--having orthonormal columns, and a probability density that is invariant to pre-multiplication by an independent unitary matrix--plays a central role in the calculation of capacity and in some special cases happens to be capacity-achieving. In this paper we take an important step towards computing this capacity by obtaining, in closed-form, the probability density of the received signal when transmitting i.r. unitary matrices. The technique is based on analytically computing the expectation of an exponential quadratic function of an i.r. unitary matrix and makes use of a Fourier integral representation of the constituent Dirac delta functions in the underlying density. Our formula for the received signal density enables us to evaluate the mutual information for any case of interest, something that could previously only be done for single transmit and receive antennas. Numerical results show that at high SNR the mutual information is maximized for M = min(N,T/2) transmit antennas, where N is the number of receive antennas and T is the length of the coherence interval, whereas at low SNR the mutual information is maximized by allocating all transmit power to a single antenna.

Status: Submitted to IEEE Trans. Info. Theory, March 2001.

Files:
   Compressed PostScript (.ps.gz) (108K),
   PostScript (.ps) (453K),
   PDF v3.0 (.pdf) (231K).

Instructions on how to view and print these files.


Bert Hochwald<hochwald@lucent.com>