On the low SNR capacity of maximum ratio combining over Rician fading channels with full channel state information

In this letter, we study the ergodic capacity of a maximum ratio combining (MRC) Rician fading channel with full channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter and at the receiver. We focus on the low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) regime and we show that the capacity scales as LΩ/K+L SNR×log(1/SNR), where Ω is the expected channel gain per branch, K is the Rician fading factor, and L is the number of diversity branches. We show that one-bit CSI feedback at the transmitter is enough to achieve this capacity using an on-off power control scheme. Our framework can be seen as a generalization of recently established results regarding the fading-channels capacity characterization in the low-SNR regime.