Impact of Transceiver Hardware Impairments on the Ergodic Channel Capacity for Rayleigh-Product MIMO Channels

This paper aims at a realistic evaluation of Rayleigh-product multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Specifically, by considering the residual transceiver hardware impairments into account, we derive the ergodic channel capacity of a MIMO system with optimal receivers in the case of insufficient scattering. Actually, motivated by the increasing interest for massive MIMO systems, we investigate the impact of transceiver hardware imperfections in systems with both finite (conventional) and large number of antennas under rank deficient channel matrix conditions by varying the severity of hardware quality. Among the interesting outcomes, we emphasize that the residual hardware transceiver impairments result to a saturation of the ergodic channel capacity within the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Furthermore, we observe that the higher the "richness" of the scattering environment, the higher the ergodic channel capacity till it gets saturated.