On the MIMO Channel Capacity of Multi-Dimensional Signal Sets

In this contribution two general formulae were derived for the capacity evaluation of Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) systems using multi-dimensional signal sets, different modulation schemes and an arbitrary number of transmit as well as receive antennas. It was shown that transmit diversity is capable of narrowing the gap between the capacity of the Rayleigh-fading channel and the AWGN channel. However, since this gap becomes narrower when the receiver diversity order is increased, for higher-order receiver diversity the performance advantage of transmit diversity diminishes. A MIMO system having full multiplexing gain has a higher achievable capacity, than the corresponding MIMO system designed for achieving full diversity gain, provided that the channel SNR is sufficiently high