Capacity, MSE and Secrecy Analysis of Linear Block Precoding for Distributed Antenna Systems in Multi-User Frequency-Selective Fading Channels

Block transmission with cyclic prefix is a promising technique to realize high-speed data rates in frequency-selective fading channels. Many popular linear precoding schemes, including orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), single-carrier (SC) block transmission, and time-reversal (TR), can be interpreted as such a block transmission. This paper presents a unified performance analysis that shows how the optimal precoding strategy depends on the optimization criterion such as capacity, mean-square error, and secrecy. We analyze three variants of TR methods (based on maximum-ratio combining, equal-gain combining and selective combining) and two-types of pre-equalization methods (zero-forcing and minimum mean-square error). As one application of our framework, we derive optimal precoding (i.e., OFDM with optimal power and phase control) in the presence of interference limitation for distributed antenna systems; we find that without power/phase control, OFDM does not have any capacity advantage over SC transmissions. When comparing SC and TR, we verify that for single-antenna systems in the high SNR regimes, SC has a capacity advantage; however, TR performs better in the low SNR regime. For distributed multiple-antenna systems, TR always provides higher capacity, and the capacity of TR can approach that of optimal precoders with a large number of distributed antennas. Furthermore, we make an analysis of secrecy capacity which shows how high-rate messages can be transmitted towards an intended user without being decoded by the other users from the viewpoint of information-theoretic security. We demonstrate that TR precoding can be the best candidate among the non-optimal precoders for achieving high secrecy capacity, while the optimal precoder offers a significant gain over those non-optimal precoders.