(06/16/20) New paper: The limiting Poisson law of massive MIMO detection

June 16, 2020
Estimating a binary vector from noisy linear measurements is a prototypical problem for MIMO systems. A popular algorithm, called the box-relaxation decoder, estimates the target signal by solving a least squares problem with convex constraints. In our recent paper, we show that the performance of the algorithm, measured by the number of incorrectly-decoded bits, has a limiting Poisson law. This occurs when the sampling ratio and noise variance, two key parameters of the problem, follow certain scalings as the system dimension grows. Moreover, at a well-defined threshold, the probability of perfect recovery is shown to undergo a phase transition that can be characterized by the Gumbel distribution.