Angle-of-Arrival-Dependent Interference Modeling in Rician Massive MIMO

Abstract

In this paper, we study the uplink in a single-cell massive multiple-input-multiple-output system. The base station (BS) is equipped with three antenna arrays, each covering one third of the cell area. Each antenna array comprises a large yet finite number of antennas. The single-antenna users are randomly and uniformly distributed in the cell, transmitting to the BS utilizing full channel inversion power control. All users experience Rician fading. Receiver maximum-ratio-combining is performed at the BS. Under such a setting, we focus on one cell sector and analyze the intrasector interference in a realistic situation where the number of BS antennas is not extremely large compared with the user number. In particular, we show that, due to the line-of-sight (LoS) component of the channel, the interference is partially determined by the angles of arrival of the signals. We approximate the LoS component interference by a Beta mixture. The interference in Rician fading is then modeled as a noncentral chi-square distribution with a random noncentrality parameter, corresponding to the LoS component. The approximate interference distribution can be used to compute signal-to-interference-ratio-dependent metrics such as outage probability and average throughput.