On the Capacity of MIMO Cellular Networks with Macrodiversity

We consider the information theoretic limits of the uplink in a MIMO cellular network with two types of macrodiversity. In the first case, the whole network acts as a multi-access channel where every base station antenna array is part of a central receiver (global macrodiversity). In the second case, we partition the network into clusters of cooperating base stations (local macrodiversity) thereby eliminating the growth in complexity at the receiver with network size. Macrodiversity is shown to provide very significant gains in sum capacity over single cell processing schemes where co-channel interference is the dominant impairment. We also explore the rate at which the sum capacity of the local macrodiversity scheme approaches that of global macrodiversity as the cluster size increases.