On the Capacity of Multiple Access and Broadcast Fading Channels with Full Channel State Information at Low SNR

We study the throughput capacity region of the Gaussian multi-access (MAC) fading channel with perfect channel state information (CSI) at the receiver and at the transmitters, at low power regime. We show that it has a multidimensional rectangle structure and thus is simply characterized by single user capacity points. More specifically, we show that at low power regime, the boundary surface of the capacity region shrinks to a single point corresponding to the sum rate maximizer and that the coordinates of this point coincide with single user capacity bounds. Inspired by this result, we propose an on-off scheme, compute its achievable rate, and show that this scheme achieves single user capacity bounds of the MAC channel for a wide class of fading channels at asymptotically low power regime. We argue that this class of fading encompasses all known wireless channels for which the capacity region of the MAC channel has even a simpler expression in terms of users' average power constraints only. Using the duality of Gaussian MAC and broadcast channels (BC), we deduce a simple characterization of the BC capacity region at low power regime and show that for a class of fading channels (including Rayleigh fading), time-sharing is asymptotically optimal.