On the Capacity of Block Multiantenna Channels

In this paper, we consider point-to-point multiantenna channels with certain block distributional symmetries that do not require the entries of the channel matrix to be either Gaussian, or independent, or identically distributed. A main contribution is a capacity theorem for these channels, which might be regarded as a generalization of Telatar's theorem (1999), which reduces the numerical optimization domain in the capacity computation. With this information theoretic result and some free probability arguments, we prove an asymptotic capacity theorem that, in addition to reducing the optimization domain, does not depend on the dimension of the channel matrix. This theorem allows us to apply free probability techniques to numerically compute the asymptotic capacity of the channels under consideration. These theorems provide a very efficient method for numerically approximating both the capacity and a capacity achieving input covariance matrix of certain channels.