Asymptotic Analysis of RZF in Large-Scale MU-MIMO Systems Over Rician Channels

In this paper, we focus on the downlink ergodic sum rate of a single-cell large-scale multiuser MIMO system in which the base station employs N antennas to communicate with K single-antenna user equipments (UEs). A regularized zero-forcing (RZF) scheme is used for precoding under the assumption that each UE uses a specific power and each link forms a spatially correlated MIMO Rician fading channel. The analysis is conducted assuming that N and K grow large with a given ratio and perfect channel state information is available at the base station. New results from random matrix theory and large system analysis are used to compute an asymptotic expression of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio as a function of system parameters, spatial correlation matrix, and Rician factor. Numerical results are used to validate the accuracy of asymptotic approximations in the finite system regime and to evaluate the performance under different operating conditions. It turns out that the asymptotic expressions provide accurate approximations even for relatively small values of N and K.