Estimating the capacity of a frequency-selective fading mobile radio channel with antenna diversity

The primary objective of this paper is to estimate the capacity of a frequency-selective fading mobile radio channel used to communicate between N mobile units and a base station operating in space diversity and where M⩾N. In general, the information theoretic value of the capacity of such a channel is not well defined because of the time-varying nature of the fading process. At best, the value of the capacity may be seen as a random variable evolving in time and whose distribution can be evaluated. The approach which has been followed in estimating the capacity uses a quasi-static model which computes the distribution over a large class of time dispersive possible realizations of the channel. Our final estimate of the numerical value of the capacity is based on the determination of an outage value corresponding to the 99% point on the cumulative distribution function. Our main result shows that a significant increase in the value of the capacity can be obtained by exploiting the inherent multipath diversity of the channel