Capacity Limits of Base Station Cooperation in Cellular Networks

In the information-theoretic literature, it has been widely shown that multicell processing is able to provide high capacity gains in the context of cellular systems. What is more, it has been proved that the per-cell sum-rate capacity of multicell processing systems grows linearly with the number of base station (BS) receive antennas. However, the majority of results in this area have been produced assuming that the fading coefficients of the MIMO subchannels are completely uncorrelated. In this direction, this chapter investigates the ergodic per-cell sum-rate capacity of the Gaussian MIMO cellular channel under correlated fading and BS cooperation (multicell processing). More specifically, the current channel model considers Rayleigh fading, uniformly distributed user terminals (UTs) over a planar cellular system, and power-law path loss. Furthermore, both BSs and UTs are equipped with correlated multiple antennas, which are modelled according to the Kronecker product correlation model. The per-cell sum-rate capacity is evaluated while varying the cell density of the system, as well as the level of receive and transmit correlation. In this context, it is shown that the capacity performance is compromised by correlation at the BS-side, whereas correlation at the UT-side has a negligible effect on the system’s capacity. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-665-5.ch004