Intrinsic capacity of the MIMO wireless channel

The paper presents a new framework for the information-theoretic analysis of multipath multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communications channels. The approach defines an upper bound on transmission that depends on the physical propagation scenario and transmit/receive antenna apertures but is otherwise independent of antenna properties. Transmit sources and receive sensors are abstracted in terms of spatial basis functions. The "intrinsic capacity" of the channel is defined as the maximum mutual information of the transmit and receive vectors over all possible modulations as well as transmit and receive basis functions and constrained by fixed average radiated power, limited transmit and receive volumes, and sensor noise. Definition of a "coherence matrix" allows a closed-form solution for the capacity under a new radiated power constraint.