On the achievable throughput of a multiantenna Gaussian broadcast channel

A Gaussian broadcast channel (GBC) with r single-antenna receivers and t antennas at the transmitter is considered. Both transmitter and receivers have perfect knowledge of the channel. Despite its apparent simplicity, this model is, in general, a nondegraded broadcast channel (BC), for which the capacity region is not fully known. For the two-user case, we find a special case of Marton's (1979) region that achieves optimal sum-rate (throughput). In brief, the transmitter decomposes the channel into two interference channels, where interference is caused by the other user signal. Users are successively encoded, such that encoding of the second user is based on the noncausal knowledge of the interference caused by the first user. The crosstalk parameters are optimized such that the overall throughput is maximum and, surprisingly, this is shown to be optimal over all possible strategies (not only with respect to Marton's achievable region). For the case of r>2 users, we find a somewhat simpler choice of Marton's region based on ordering and successively encoding the users. For each user i in the given ordering, the interference caused by users j>i is eliminated by zero forcing at the transmitter, while interference caused by users j<i is taken into account by coding for noncausally known interference. Under certain mild conditions, this scheme is found to be throughput-wise asymptotically optimal for both high and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We conclude by providing some numerical results for the ergodic throughput of the simplified zero-forcing scheme in independent Rayleigh fading.