The optimality of beamforming in uplink multiuser wireless systems

This paper considers the optimal uplink transmission strategy that achieves the sum-capacity in a multiuser multi-antenna wireless system. Assuming an independent identically distributed block-fading model with transmitter channel side information, beamforming for each remote user is shown to be necessary for achieving sum-capacity when there is a large number of users in the system. This result stands even in the case where each user is equipped with a large number of transmit antennas, and it can be readily extended to channels with intersymbol interference if an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing modulation is assumed. This result is obtained by deriving a rank bound on the transmit covariance matrices, and it suggests that all users should cooperate by each user using only a small portion of available dimensions. Based on the result, a suboptimal transmit scheme is proposed for the situation where only partial channel side information is available at each transmitter. Simulations show that the suboptimal scheme is not only able to achieve a sum rate very close to the capacity, but also insensitive to channel estimation error.