Capacity Limits and Multiplexing Gains of MIMO Channels with Transceiver Impairments

摘要

The capacity of ideal MIMO channels has a high-SNR slope that equals theminimum of the number of transmit and receive antennas. This letter analyzes ifthis result holds when there are distortions from physical transceiverimpairments. We prove analytically that such physical MIMO channels have afinite upper capacity limit, for any channel distribution and SNR. The high-SNRslope thus collapses to zero. This appears discouraging, but we prove theencouraging result that the relative capacity gain of employing MIMO is atleast as large as with ideal transceivers.