Abstract

The distributed antenna system (DAS) has become a promising candidate for future mobile communication systems thanks to its open architecture and flexible resource management. In DASs, many remote antenna ports are geographically distributed over a large area and connected to a central processor by fiber or coaxial cable. Although the idea of DAS was originally proposed to cover the dead spots in indoor wireless communication systems, research activities on cellular DASs have been intensified in the past few years owing to the fast growing demand for high data-rate services.

For cellular systems, the use of distributed base-station (BS) antennas enables efficient utilization of spatial resources, which, on the other hand, also significantly complicates the channel modeling and system analysis. Despite the common belief that substantial capacity gains should be provided by cellular DASs over the conventional cellular systems with co-located BS antennas, how to characterize such gains in the multiuser scenario remains largely unknown. In this talk, I will introduce my recent work on the capacity analysis of large-scale cellular DASs. The analysis will answer a series of fundamental questions such as how the BS antenna topology affects the uplink sum capacity of cellular networks, where the capacity gains of distributed BS antennas come from, and how they vary with key parameters including the availability of channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) and the number of BS antennas.

About the speaker

Dr. Lin Dai received her Ph. D. degree from Tsinghua University in 2003. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and University of Delaware. Since 2007, she has been with City University of Hong Kong, where she is an associate professor. She has broad research interests in wireless communications and networking theory. She received the Best Paper Award at IEEE WCNC 2007 and the IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in 2009.