Spectral Efficiency Bounds for Interference-Limited SVD-MIMO Cellular Communication Systems

The ergodic spectral efficiency (SE) in interference-limited multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) downlink cellular systems is characterized based on stochastic geometry. A single user is served by using singular value decomposition precoding and combining. By approximating the expectations of the channel eigenvalues, we derive upper and lower bounds on the ergodic SE. The obtained upper bound is the best possible system-level performance of any MIMO strategy in non-cooperative cellular networks. We validate our analytical results through simulation. We also conjecture that there exists the optimal number of streams being proportional to the pathloss exponent.