Distributed antenna system capacity scaling [Coordinated and Distributed MIMO]

The distributed antenna system concept promises to enhance the capacity and diversity of next-generation wireless communication networks, due to the inherently added micro and macro diversity. In this article we first give an overview of the main benefits of a DAS in relation to a collocated antenna system. Next we study the sum-capacity scaling of a multi-user DAS with the number of jointly processed transmit antennas in the downlink. In a practical system this scaling will have implications on the number of antennas worth jointly processing, since the costs of processing an additional antenna can be higher than the additional benefits obtained. Results show that the most important system property to attain the highest capacity gains is symmetry, and the users that attain the maximum gain are those at cell borders. They also confirm that the main DAS feature that makes possible its gains over the CAS architecture are the additional degrees of freedom/diversity provided by such an architecture, which increase the probability of finding a system state with high symmetry and of each user being near one of the transmit antennas.