Analysis on the Empirical Spectral Distribution of Large Sample Covariance Matrix and Applications for Large Antenna Array Processing

Abstract: This paper addresses the asymptotic behavior of a particular type of information-plus-noise-type matrices, where the column and row number of the matrices are large and of the same order, while signals are diverged and time delays of the channel are fixed. We prove that the empirical spectral distribution (ESD) of the large dimension sample covariance matrix and a well-studied spiked central Wishart matrix converge to the same distribution. As an application, an asymptotic power function is presented for the general likelihood ratio statistics for testing the presence of signal in large array signal processing.