Abstract—The analysis of the multiple-antenna capacity in the high- regime has hitherto focused on the high- slope (or maximum multiplexing gain), which quantifies the multiplicative increase as a function of the number of antennas. This traditional characterization is unable to assess the impact of prominent channel features since, for a majority of channels, the slope equals the minimum of the number of transmit and receive antennas. Furthermore, a characterization based solely on the slope captures only the scaling but it has no notion of the power required for a certain capacity. This paper advocates a more refined characterization whereby, as a function of �f, the high- capacity is expanded as an affine function where the impact of channel features such as antenna correlation, unfaded components, etc., resides in the zero-order term or power offset. The power offset, for which we find insightful closed-form expressions, is shown to play a chief role for levels of practical interest. Index Terms—Antenna correlation, channel capacity, coherent communication, fading channels, high- analysis, multiantenna arrays, Ricean channels.

This paper applies random matrix theory to obtain analytical characterizations of the capacity of correlated multiantenna channels. The analysis is not restricted to the popular separable correlation model, but rather it embraces a more general representation that subsumes most of the channel models that have been treated in the literature. For arbitrary signal-to-noise ratios @ A, the characterization is conducted in the regime of large numbers of antennas. For the low- and high- regions, in turn, we uncover compact capacity expansions that are valid for arbitrary numbers of antennas and that shed insight on how antenna correlation impacts the tradeoffs among power, bandwidth, and rate.