Statistical mechanical analysis of the Kronecker channel model for MIMO wireless communication

TL;DR

This paper applies statistical mechanics to analyze the Kronecker channel model in MIMO wireless communication, addressing correlation effects among antennas and proposing a formalism for performance evaluation.

Contribution

It develops a formalism to handle correlations in Kronecker models and maps certain cases to one-dimensional spin systems for exact analysis.

Findings

Correlations increase performance degradation beyond fourth order.

The analytical scheme is accurate for small correlation strengths.

Performance analysis can be mapped to spin systems for specific correlations.

Abstract

The Kronecker channel model of wireless communication is analyzed using statistical mechanics methods. In the model, spatial proximities among transmission/reception antennas are taken into account as certain correlation matrices, which generally yield non-trivial dependence among symbols to be estimated. This prevents accurate assessment of the communication performance by naively using a previously developed analytical scheme based on a matrix integration formula. In order to resolve this difficulty, we develop a formalism that can formally handle the correlations in Kronecker models based on the known scheme. Unfortunately, direct application of the developed scheme is, in general, practically difficult. However, the formalism is still useful, indicating that the effect of the correlations generally increase after the fourth order with respect to correlation strength. Therefore, the known analytical scheme offers a good approximation in performance evaluation when the correlation strength is sufficiently small. For a class of specific correlation, we show that the performance analysis can be mapped to the problem of one-dimensional spin systems in random fields, which can be investigated without approximation by the belief propagation algorithm.