Asymptotic analysis of multicell massive MIMO over Rician fading channels

International audienceThis work considers the downlink of a multicell massive MIMO system in which L base stations (BSs) of N antennas each communicate with K single-antenna user equipments randomly positioned in the coverage area. Within this setting, we are interested in evaluating the sum rate of the system when MRT and RZF are employed under the assumption that each intracell link forms a MIMO Rician uncorrelated fading channel. The analysis is conducted assuming that N and K grow large with a non-trivial ratio N/K under the assumption that the data transmission in each cell is affected by channel estimation errors, pilot contamination, and an arbitrary large scale attenuation. Numerical results are used to validate the asymptotic analysis in the finite system regime and to evaluate the network performance under different settings. The asymptotic results are also instrumental to get insights into the interplay among system parameters