Distributed MIMO Receiver—Achievable Rates and Upper Bounds

A multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with a distributed receiver is considered. The system consists of a nomadic transmitter with several antennas, whose signal is received by multiple agents, exhibiting independent channel gains and an additive circular-symmetric Gaussian noise. In the nomadic regime, we assume that the agents do not have any decoding ability. These agents process their channel observations and forward them to the final destination through unidirectional lossless links with a fixed capacity. We propose new achievable rates based on elementary compression and on Wyner-Ziv (WZ)or chief executive officer (CEO) processing, for both fast-fading and block-fading channels, as well as for general discrete channels. The simpler two agents scheme is solved, up to an implicit equation with a single variable. Limiting the nomadic transmitter to circular-symmetric Gaussian signaling, new upper bounds are derived, based on the vector version of the entropy power inequality. Several asymptotic settings are analyzed. In addition, the upper bounds are analytically shown to be tight for several examples, while numerical calculations reveal a rather small gap in a finite 2 times 2 setting. The advantage of the WZ approach over elementary compression is shown, where only the former can achieve the optimal diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT).