Multiple-access strategies for frequency-selective MIMO channels

In this paper, we consider frequency-selective coherent multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiple-access fading channels. Assuming that each of the users employs orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), we introduce a multiple-access scheme that gradually varies the amount of user collision in signal space by assigning different subsets of the available OFDM tones to different users. The corresponding multiple-access schemes range from frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) (each OFDM tone is assigned to at most one user) to CDMA (each OFDM tone is assigned to all the users). We quantify the effect of signal space collision between the users by computing the ergodic capacity region for the entire family of multiple-access schemes. It is shown that the ergodic capacity region obtained by a fully collision-based scheme (CDMA) is an outer bound to that corresponding to any other multiple-access strategy. In practice, however, minimizing the amount of user collision in frequency is desirable as this minimizes the receiver complexity incurred by having to separate the interfering (colliding) signals. Our analysis shows that the impact of collision on spectral efficiency depends critically on the channel's spatial fading statistics and the number of antennas.