Linear multiuser receivers in random environments

We study the signal-to-interference (SIR) performance of linear multiuser receivers in random environments, where signals from the users arrive in "random directions." Such a random environment may arise in a DS-CDMA system with random signature sequences, or in a system with antenna diversity where the randomness is due to channel fading. Assuming that such random directions can be tracked by the receiver, the resulting SIR performance is a function of the directions and therefore also random. We study the asymptotic distribution of this random performance in the regime where both the number of users K and the number of degrees of freedom N in the system are large, but keeping their ratio fixed. Our results show that for both the decorrelator and the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) receiver, the variance of the SIR distribution decreases like 1/N, and the SIR distribution is asymptotically Gaussian. We compute closed-form expressions for the asymptotic means and variances for both receivers. Simulation results are presented to verify the accuracy of the asymptotic results for finite-sized systems.