Downlink Capacity of Distributed Antenna Systems in a Multi-Cell Environment

In this paper, the downlink performance of a distributed antenna system (DAS) with random antenna layout is investigated. We address the problem of characterizing the downlink capacity with the generalized assumptions: (al) per distributed antenna power constraint, (a2) generalized mobile terminals equipped with multiple antennas, (a3) a multi-cell environment. Based on system scale-up, we derive a good approximation of the ergodic downlink capacity by adopting random matrix theory. We also propose an iterative method to calculate the unknown parameter in the approximation. The approximation is illustrated to be quite accurate and the iterative method is verified to be quite efficient by Monte Carlo simulations.