Time reversal communication in Rayleigh-fading broadcast channels with pinholes

Abstract The Letter presents an analysis of the time reversal in independent-multipath Rayleigh-fading channels with N inputs (transmitters) and M outputs (receivers). The main issues addressed are the condition of statistical stability, the rate of information transfer and the effect of pinholes. The stability condition is proved to be M C ≪ N eff B for broadband channels and M ≪ N eff for narrowband channels where C is the symbol rate, B is the bandwidth and N eff is the effective number (maybe less than 1) of transmitters. It is shown that when the number of screens, n − 1 , is relatively low compared to the logarithm of numbers of pinholes N eff is given by the harmonic (or inverse) sum of the number of transmitters and the numbers of pinholes at all screens. The novel idea of the effective number of time reversal array (TRA) elements is introduced to derive the stability condition and estimate the channel capacity in the presence of multi-screen pinholes. The information rate, under the constraints of the noise power ν per unit frequency and the average total power P, attains the supremum P / ν in the regime M ∧ N eff ≫ P / ( ν B ) . In particular, when N eff ≫ M ≫ P / ( B ν ) the optimal information rate can be achieved with statistically stable, sharply focused signals.