On the capacity of MIMO Rician broadcast channels

In this paper, a downlink communication system, in which a base station (BS) equipped with M antennas communicates with N (N Gt 1) single-antenna users, in a Rician fading environment is considered. The asymptotic (in terms of the number of users) sum-rate capacity of the system, as well as the capacity-achieving strategies, are derived. The main results of the paper are as follows: i) in the region of K = o(log N), where K denotes the Rician factor, the sum-rate capacity scales as M log(1 + P/Meta), where P denotes the SNR and eta =Delta log N/1+K, which is achieved by zero-forcing beam-forming (ZFBF) along with a low-complexity user selection algorithm that considers only the scattered component of the userspsila channels, ii) in the region K = omega(log N), in the case of co-located transmit antennas, the capacity scales as log(1+MP), which is achieved by time division multiple access (TDMA), iii) in the region K = omega(log N), in the case of isotropically-distributed specular components, the sum-rate capacity behaves as M log(1 + P), which is achieved by ZFBF, along with a user selection algorithm that considers only the specular component of the userspsila channels.