The Effect of Unequal Power Reception in Cellular MIMO Networks

There has been an increasing interest in multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems for high speed wireless networks. Despite this, some important questions, such as the effect of unequal power reception in cellular MIMO networks, still remained open to be answered. In this paper we propose an analytical framework to evaluate the performance of such networks when the received powers from different transmit antennas vary due, for example, to spatial distribution of users, power allocation strategies, and shadowing conditions. In particular, we consider coherent detection of M-PSK signals in a flat Rayleigh fading environment using minimum mean square error (MMSE) combining, followed by successive interference cancellation (SIC). The methodology is valid for arbitrary number of receive and transmit antennas. This framework can also be applied to the performance evaluation of low complexity point-to-point MIMO systems with SIC. Our results provide insight into interference management strategies for multiuser MIMO networks.