EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 
Volume 2006 (2006), Article ID 39436, 11 pages
doi:10.1155/ASP/2006/39436

On the Channel Capacity of Multiantenna Systems with Nakagami Fading

Feng Zheng1 and Thomas Kaiser2

 1Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
2Department of Communication Systems, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg 47048, Germany
Received 12 September 2005; Revised 13 January 2006; Accepted 9 March 2006

Recommended by Christoph Mecklenbrauker

Abstract

We discuss the channel capacity of multiantenna systems with the Nakagami fading channel. Analytic expressions for the ergodic channel capacity or its lower bound are given for SISO, SIMO, and MISO cases. Formulae for the outage probability of the capacity are presented. It is shown that the channel capacity could be increased logarithmically with the number of receive antennas for SIMO case; while employing 3–5 transmit antennas (irrespective of all other parameters considered herein) can approach the best advantage of the multiple transmit antenna systems as far as channel capacity is concerned for MISO case. We have shown that for a given SNR, the outage probability decreases considerably with the number of receive antennas for SIMO case, while for MISO case, the upper bound of the outage probability decreases with the number of transmit antennas when the transmission rate is lower than some value, but increases instead when the transmission rate is higher than another value. A critical transmission rate is identified.