On capacity of Rician MIMO channels

Use of antenna arrays at both sides of the communication link can result in high channel capacities provided that the propagation medium is rich scattering. Previous studies on MIMO wireless structures have mostly considered Rayleigh fading conditions. Here a study is made on the capacity of Rician channels; it is shown that depending on the number of antennas, the MIMO capacity achieved under the condition of Rician fading may be greater or smaller than the capacity in the case of Rayleigh fading. In particular, for a large number of antennas, Rician channels exhibit smaller capacity than Rayleigh channels. On the other hand, for Rician channels, if the line-of-sight component is not very significant, the increase in capacity by an increase in the number of antennas can still be considerable