Multi-cell MMSE Combining over Correlated Rician Channels in Massive MIMO Systems

This work investigates the uplink of massive MIMO systems using multi-cell MMSE (M-MMSE) combining that was shown to yield unbounded capacity in Rayleigh fading. All intra and inter-cell channels are correlated with distinct per-user Rician factors and channel correlation matrices, pilot contamination and imperfect channel estimation. First, a closed-form approximation of the spectral efficiency (SE) is derived thus enabling to demonstrate that, under certain conditions on the correlation matrices, M-MMSE generates unbounded SE in Rician fading. Second, the impact of inter-cell LoS components is examined in favorable propagation conditions, and, interestingly, shown to be more beneficial in terms of SE than when these interfering links are entirely scattered.