Asymptotic Spectral Efficiency of the Uplink in Spatially Distributed Wireless Networks with Multi-Antenna Base Stations

The spectral efficiency of a representative uplink of a given length, in interference-limited, spatially-distributed wireless networks with hexagonal cells, simple power control, and multiantenna linear Minimum-Mean-Square-Error receivers is found to approach an asymptote as the numbers of base-station antennas N and wireless nodes go to infinity. An approximation for the area-averaged spectral efficiency of a representative link (averaged over the spatial base-station and mobile distributions), for Poisson distributed base stations, is also provided. For large N, in the interference-limited regime, the area-averaged spectral efficiency is primarily a function of the ratio of the product of N and the ratio of base-station to wireless-node densities, indicating that it is possible to scale such networks by linearly increasing the product of the number of base-station antennas and the relative density of base stations to wireless nodes, with wireless-node density. The results are useful for designers of wireless systems with high inter-cell interference because it provides simple expressions for spectral efficiency as a function of tangible system parameters like base-station and wireless-node densities, and number of antennas. These results were derived combining infinite random matrix theory and stochastic geometry.