Asymptotic Analysis of the Gaussian Broadcast Channel with Perturbation Preprocessing

Abstract

The sum rate capacity of the multi-antenna Gaussian broadcast channel has recently been computed. However, the search for computationally efficient practical schemes that achieve it is still in progress. When the channel state information is fully available at the transmitter, the dirty paper coding (DPC) technique is known to achieve the maximal throughput, but is computationally infeasible. In this paper, we analyze the asymptotic behavior of one of its alternatives - the recently suggested so-called vector perturbation technique. We show that for a square channel, where the number of users is large and equal to the number of transmit antennas, its sum rate approaches that of the DPC technique. More precisely, we show that at both low and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the scheme under consideration is asymptotically optimal. Furthermore, we obtain similar results in the case where the number of users is much larger than the number of transmit antennas.