Downlink performance and capacity of distributed antenna systems in a multicell environment

Distributed antenna systems (DAS) have been widely implemented in state-of-the art cellular communication systems to cover dead spots. Recent academic studies have shown that in addition to coverage improvements, DAS can also have potential advantages such as reduced power and increased system capacity in a single cell environment. This paper analytically quantifies downlink capacity of multicell DAS for two different transmission strategies: selection diversity (where just one or two of the distributed antennas are used) and blanket transmission (where all antennas in the cell broadcast data). Simple repeaters are a special case of our analysis. A generalized information theoretic analysis is provided to illuminate the fundamental limits of such systems in the cellular context. The results show that DAS reduces other-cell interference in a multicell environment and hence significantly improves capacity (by about 2x), with particularly large improvements for users near cell boundaries. Less obviously, from a communication theory standpoint, it is shown that selection diversity is preferable to blanket transmission in terms of achievable ergodic capacity. For. blanket transmission, we show that the optimal transmission strategy is just phase steering due to the per antenna module power constraints in DAS.