On the Capacity of Cellular Networks with MIMO Links

We provide scaling results for the sum capacity of the multi-access, uplink channel in a flat fading environment, when there is interference from other cells. We consider a scaling regime where the number of antennas per user remains fixed but the number of antennas at the base station and the number of users in each cell grow large together. We characterize the asymptotic behaviour of the spectral efficiencies in each cell, in three scenarios: 1) single cell processing with full frequency reuse 2) single cell processing, with frequency re-use partitioning of adjacent cells and 3) base station cooperative decoding (macro-diversity). It is shown that base station cooperation provides very significant gains in spectral efficiency over single cell processing.