Performance analysis of multi-cell MMSE based receivers in MU-MIMO systems with very large antenna arrays

Uplink minimum mean-square-error (MMSE) detection in multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems with multi-cell setup is investigated in this paper. We first derive a closed form lower bound on the ergodic achievable uplink rate for each user, assuming perfect channel state information available at the base station.We further analyze and compare the asymptotic performance of an uplink with multi-cell MMSE based detection to its special case of single-cell MMSE detection. The analysis results indicate that the use of large number of base station antennas in multi-cell MU-MIMO systems leads to an increase of energy and spectral efficiency. Our analysis is based on results from random matrix theory and is verified by the simulations.