On the Multicell Processing Capacity of the Cellular MIMO Uplink Channel in Correlated Rayleigh Fading Environment

In the context of cellular systems, it has been shown that multi-cell processing can eliminate inter-cell interference and provide high spectral efficiencies with respect to traditional interference-limited implementations. Moreover, it has been proved that the multiplexing sum-rate capacity gain of multi-cell processing systems is proportional to the number of Base Station (BS) antennas. These results have been also established for cellular systems, where BSs and User Terminals (UTs) are equipped with multiple antennas. Nevertheless, a common simplifying assumption in the literature is the uncorrelated nature of the Rayleigh fading coefficients within the BS-UT MIMO links. In this direction, this paper investigates the ergodic multi-cell-processing sum-rate capacity of the Gaussian MIMO Cellular Multiple-Access Channel in a correlated fading environment.