On Non-coherent MIMO Channels in the Wideband Regime: Capacity and Reliability

We consider a multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) wideband Rayleigh block fading channel where the channel state is unknown to both the transmitter and the receiver and there is only an average power constraint on the input. We compute the capacity and analyze its dependence on coherence length, number of antennas and receive signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) per degree of freedom. We establish conditions on the coherence length and number of antennas for the non-coherent channel to have a "near coherent" performance in the wideband regime. We also propose a signaling scheme that is near-capacity achieving in this regime. We compute the error probability for this wideband non-coherent MIMO channel and study its dependence on SNR, number of transmit and receive antennas and coherence length. We show that error probability decays inversely with coherence length and exponentially with the product of the number of transmit and receive antennas. Moreover, channel outage dominates error probability in the wideband regime. We also show that the critical as well as cut-off rates are much smaller than channel capacity in this regime.