On the capacity of a multiple-antenna communication link with channel side information

We investigate the capacity of a system with multiple transmit and receive antennas, assuming that the transmitter and receiver both have access to (possibly defective) channel-state information. Two different special cases of a general system are studied in detail. Our main results are capacity expressions for these cases and a general conclusion that the encoder can be split into separate "space-time coding" and "direction weighting" or "beamforming," without capacity loss. We also present numerical results illustrating the dependence of capacity on the parameters of a quantization scheme providing channel-state information to the transmitter from the receiver. These results have high practical value since the assumptions behind them are closely related to the ones of the closed-loop mode in the UMTS/WCDMA standard.