Capacity Analysis of Adaptive Transmission with MRC in Arbitrarily Correlated Rayleigh Fading

This work presents exact closed-form expressions for the channel capacity of wireless communication systems with multiple receive antennas under correlated Rayleigh fading, where spatial diversity is exploited with the maximal ratio combining (MRC) technique. Instantaneous channel state information is assumed to be known at both the transmit and receive ends, allowing different adaptation strategies to optimize the performance. Unlike previous related works, correlation among the receive antennas is assumed to be arbitrary and no particular requirement about the eigenvalues of the correlation matrix is considered. Additionally, the average received power per antenna is assumed to be also arbitrary.