Effect of Spatial Correlation on the Performance of Non-coherent Massive MIMO based on DMPSK

A rigorous analysis of the effect of spatial correlation for non-coherent (NC) massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) in Rician channels is important to determine its applicability in these scenarios. We conduct such analysis for a single base station (BS) and a more general case of several BSs, all of them showing correlation among their own antennas but with uncorrelated channels with respect to each other. We first perform an analysis of the distribution of the received symbols, then propose some approximations to give a closed form expression of the symbol error probability (SER) and the signal-to-interference-and-noise-ratio (SINR) as performance measures. Finally, we extract some conclusions from this analysis to show how the combined use of several BSs and larger Rician components can be beneficial in this scenario. Some numerical results are added to confirm the accuracy of the analysis.