Scaling Laws of Multiple Antenna Group-Broadcast Channels

Broadcast (or point to multipoint) communication has attracted a lot of research recently. In this paper, we consider the group broadcast channel where the users' pool is divided into groups, each of which is interested in common information. Such a situation occurs for example in digital audio and video broadcast where the users are divided into various groups according to the shows they are interested in. The paper obtains upper and lower bounds for the sum rate capacity in the large number of users regime and quantifies the effect of spatial correlation on the system capacity. The paper also studies the scaling of the system capacity when the number of users and antennas grow simultaneously. It is shown that in order to achieve a constant rate per user, the number of transmit antennas should scale at least logarithmically in the number of users.