In a massive MIMO system with large arrays, the channel becomes spatially non-stationary. We study the impact of spatial non-stationarity characterized by visibility regions (VRs) where the channel energy is significant on a portion of the array. Relying on a channel model based on VRs, we provide expressions of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of conjugate beamforming (CB) and zero-forcing (ZF) precoders. We also provide an approximate deterministic equivalent of the SINR of ZF precoders. We identify favorable and unfavorable multi-user configurations of the VRs and compare the performance of both stationary and non-stationary channels through analysis and numerical simulations.
@article{arxiv.1810.09907,
title = {Linear Receivers in Non-stationary Massive MIMO Channels with Visibility Regions},
author = {Anum Ali and Elisabeth de Carvalho and Robert W. Heath},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.09907},
year = {2018}
}