Capacity of correlated MIMO Rayleigh channels

This paper presents some exact results on the capacity of multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) channels subject to correlated Rayleigh fading when perfect channel state information (CSI) is known at the receiver. The authors focus on the semicorrelated scenario in which correlation exists either at the transmitter or at the receiver. They consider two cases: 1) the transmitter does not have any CSI and as such allocates power equally among transmitter antennas and 2) the transmitter only knows the statistical distribution of the channel. The first case derives the moment generating function (MGF) of the mutual information (MI) and then deduces from this MGF the mean MI. The authors also study the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the MI, which can serve as an upper bound to the outage probability under the capacity versus outage formulation when the channel is nonergodic. The second case studies the capacity achieved by optimum power-loading and beamforming schemes based on covariance feedback. Numerical results illustrate that the full capacity of MIMO systems can be preserved even for relatively high values of correlation coefficients.