How Does Correlation Affect the Capacity of MIMO Systems with Rate Constraints?

In this paper, we study the impact of antenna correlation at mobile units (MUs) on the capacity of multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with rate constraints. Both numerical results and asymptotic analyses show that antenna correlation can actually be regarded as a beneficial factor for such systems. It is also shown that the maximum eigenmode beamforming (MEB) based interleave-division multiple-access (IDMA) system is an effective platform to exploit the potential gain provided by antenna correlation at MUs.