In this contribution, the capacity-achieving input covariance matrices for coherent blockfading correlated MIMO Rician channels are determined. In contrast with the Rayleigh and uncorrelated Rician cases, no closed-form expressions for the eigenvectors of the optimum input covariance matrix are available. Classically, both the eigenvectors and eigenvalues are computed by numerical techniques. As the corresponding optimization algorithms are not very attractive, an approximation of the average mutual information is evaluated in this paper in the asymptotic regime where the number of transmit and receive antennas converge to +∞ at the same rate. New results related to the accuracy of the corresponding large system approximation are provided. An attractive optimization algorithm of this approximation is proposed and we establish that it yields an effective way to compute the capacity achieving covariance matrix for the average mutual information. Finally, numerical simulation results show that, even for a moderate number of transmit and receive antennas, the new approach provides the same results as direct maximization approaches of the average mutual information, while being much more computationally attractive. Index TermsThis work was partially supported by the "Fonds National de la Science" via the ACI program "Nouvelles Interfaces des Mathématiques", project MALCOM number 205 and by the IST Network of Excellence NEWCOM, project number 507325. J. Dumont was with France Telecom and Université Paris-Est, France. dumont@crans.org , W. Hachem and J. Najim are with CNRS and Télécom Paris, Paris, France. {hachem,najim}@enst.fr , S. Lasaulce is with CNRS and SUPELEC, France. lasaulce@lss.supelec.fr , P. Loubaton is with Université Paris Est, IGM LabInfo, UMR CNRS 8049, France. loubaton@univ-mlv.fr , 1. Instantaneous channel state information is assumed at the receiver but not necessarily at the transmitter.

International audienceWe describe a noncooperative interference alignment (IA) technique which allows an opportunistic multiple input multiple output (MIMO) link (secondary) to harmlessly coexist with another MIMO link (primary) in the same frequency band. Assuming perfect channel knowledge at the primary receiver and transmitter, capacity is achieved by transmiting along the spatial directions (SD) associated with the singular values of its channel matrix using a water-filling power allocation (PA) scheme. Often, power limitations lead the primary transmitter to leave some of its SD unused. Here, it is shown that the opportunistic link can transmit its own data if it is possible to align the interference produced on the primary link with such unused SDs.We provide both a processing scheme to perform IA and a PA scheme which maximizes the transmission rate of the opportunistic link. The asymptotes of the achievable transmission rates of the opportunistic link are obtained in the regime of large numbers of antennas. Using this result, it is demonstrated that depending on the signal-to-noise ratio and the number of transmit and receive antennas of the primary and opportunistic links, both systems can achieve transmission rates of the same order

The problem of energy-efficient precoding is investigated when the terminals in the system are equipped with multiple antennas. Considering static and fast-fading multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels, the energy-efficiency is defined as the transmission rate to power ratio and shown to be maximized at low transmit power. The most interesting case is the one of slow fading MIMO channels. For this type of channels, the optimal precoding scheme is generally not trivial. Furthermore, using all the available transmit power is not always optimal in the sense of energy-efficiency (which, in this case, corresponds to the communication-theoretic definition of the goodput-to-power (GPR) ratio). Finding the optimal precoding matrices is shown to be a new open problem and is solved in several special cases: 1. when there is only one receive antenna; 2. in the low or high signal-to-noise ratio regime; 3. when uniform power allocation and the regime of large numbers of antennas are assumed. A complete numerical analysis is provided to illustrate the derived results and stated conjectures. In particular, the impact of the number of antennas on the energy-efficiency is assessed and shown to be significant.