Some results on the sum-rate capacity of MIMO fading broadcast channels

We study the ergodic sum-rate capacity of the fading MIMO broadcast channel which is used to model the downlink of a cellular system with N_t transmit antennas at the,base and K mobile users each having N_r receive antennas. Assuming perfect channel state information (CSI) for all users is available at the transmitter and the receivers, we evaluate the sum-rate capacity numerically using the duality between uplink and downlink. Assuming Nt K, we also derive both upper and lower bounds on the sum-rate capacity to study its increase rate due to multi-user diversity. Finally, we compare three transmission schemes which use the single-user-MIMO scheme (SU-MIMO), ranked known interference (RKI) and zero-forcing beamforming (ZFB), respectively, to transmit to a selected set of users in order to approach the sum-rate capacity. We show that both ZFB and RKI outperform SU-MIMO in a cellular downlink scenario. when many mobile users are present.