Decentralized Receiver in a MIMO system

In this paper we investigate the achievable rate of a system that includes a nomadic transmitter with several antennas, which is received by multiple agents, each with a single antenna, suffering independent channel coefficients and additive Gaussian noises. Since the transmitter is nomadic, the agents do not have any decoding ability. These agents process their channel observations and forward it to the final destination through lossless links with a fixed given capacity. Assuming Gaussian signalling, we get lower and upper bounds on the achievable rates, and demonstrate the achievability of the full multiplexing gain. We also extend the model to address multi-user systems. The asymptotic setting with numbers of agents and transmitter's antennas taken to infinity is examined, and the incompetence of the simple compression when compared to a Wyner-Ziv scheme is demonstrated. For finite setting, an upper-bound is derived, which turns out to be quite tight when compared to the Wyner-Ziv achievable rate, even for a rather small 4 × 4 system.