A Statistical-Physics Approach to the Analysisof Wireless Communication Systems

MULTIPLE antennas at each side of the communication channel seem to be vital for future wireless communication systems. Multi-antenna communication provides throughput gains roughly proportional to the smallest number of antennas at the communicating terminals. On the other hand, multiple antennas at a terminal inevitably increase the hardware complexity of the latter. For efficient design of such systems relevant mathematical tools, capable of capturing the most significant features of the wireless multi-antenna channel–such as fading, spatial correlation, interference–are essential. This thesis, based on the asymptotic methods from statistical physics and random matrix theory, develops a series of asymptotic approximations for various metrics characterizing the performance of multi-antenna systems in different settings. The approximations become increasingly precise as the number of antennas at each terminal grows large and are shown to significantly simplify the performance analysis. This, in turn, enables efficient performance optimization, which would otherwise be intractable. After a general introduction, provided in Chapter 2, this thesis provides four different applications of large-system analysis. Thus, Chapter 3 analyzes multi-antenna multiple-access channel in the presence of non-Gaussian interference. The obtained large-system approximation of the sum rate is further used to carry out the precoder optimization routine for both Gaussian and finite-alphabet types of inputs. Meanwhile, Chapter 4 carries out the large-system analysis for a multi-hop relay channel with an arbitrary number of hops. Suboptimality of some conventional detectors has been captured through the concept of generalized posterior mean estimate. The obtained decoupling principle allows performance evaluation for a number of conventional detection schemes in terms of achievable rates and bit error rate. Chapter 5, in turn, studies achievable secrecy rates of multi-antenna wiretap channels in three different scenarios. In the quasi-static scenario, an alternating-optimization algorithm for the non-convex precoder optimization problem is proposed. The algorithm is shown to outperform the existing solutions, and it is conjectured to provide a secrecy capacity-achieving precoder. In the uncorrelated ergodic scenario, a largesystem analysis is carried out for the ergodic secrecy capacity yielding a closed-form expression. In the correlated ergodic scenario, the obtained large-system approximation is used to address the corresponding problem of precoder optimization. Finally, Chapter 6 addresses a practical case of random network topology for two v