Large System Analysis of Sum Capacity in the Gaussian MIMO Broadcast Channel

We analyze the achievable sum rate of the Gaussian MIMO broadcast channel. We first consider Multiple-Input Single-Output (MISO) channels and derive the large system limit of the sum capacity as the number of users and transmit antennas go to infinity with a fixed ratio. We then consider Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) broadcast channels and fix the number of users and let the number of transmit and receive antennas tend to infinity with fixed ratio. As in this case an asymptotic expression for sum capacity is hard to obtain, we evaluate the large system sum rate corresponding to successive zero-forcing beamforming with Dirty-Paper Coding. The analysis gives a lower bound on the large system sum capacity, which is numerically observed to be quite close. In addition, large system analysis is applied to estimate the relatively small performance losses with respect to sum capacity of successive zero-forcing beamforming with and without Dirty-Paper Coding in finite MISO systems.