Equal-Gain Transmission in Massive MIMO Systems Under Ricean Fading

This paper considers a multicell downlink (DL) massive MIMO system operating over Ricean fading channels in which each base station (BS) is equipped with a massive antenna array, while each user has a single antenna. We explore equal-gain transmission (EGT), line-of-sight (LOS) component-based EGT (LOS-EGT) and maximum-ratio transmission (MRT) under imperfect channel state information. Closed-form expressions for lower bounds of the achievable rates are derived for EGT over Ricean and Rayleigh fading channels, and for LOS-EGT and MRT over Ricean fading channels. With the obtained closed-form expressions, various power scaling laws concerning DL data transmit power and uplink (UL) pilot transmit power are established and discussed. In particular, it is found that, as the number of BS antennas M grows unlimited, the lower bounds on the rates achieved with EGT, LOS-EGT and MRT schemes approach infinity and are not affected by pilot contamination, while the DL data transmit power and UL pilot transmit power can be scaled down proportionally to M-a and M-b (where 0 <= a < 1 and b > 0), respectively. Numerical results corroborate the tightness and accuracy of these closed-form expressions and they also show that, when the number of antennas and intercell interference level are large, compared to the MRT, EGT and LOS-EGT are more resistant to intercell interference and pilot contamination.