From Bayesian Asymptotics to General Large-Scale MIMO Capacity

We present a unifying framework that bridges Bayesian asymptotics and information theory to analyze the asymptotic Shannon capacity of general large-scale MIMO channels including ones with nonlinearities or imperfect hardware. We derive both an analytic capacity formula and an asymptotically optimal input distribution in the large-antenna regime, each of which depends solely on the single-output channel's Fisher information through a term we call the (tilted) Jeffreys factor. We demonstrate how our method applies broadly to scenarios with clipping, coarse quantization (including 1-bit ADCs), phase noise, fading with imperfect CSI, and even optical Poisson channels. Our asymptotic analysis motivates a practical approach to constellation design via a compander-like transformation. Furthermore, we introduce a low-complexity receiver structure that approximates the log-likelihood by quantizing the channel outputs into finitely many bins, enabling near-capacity performance with computational complexity independent of the output dimension. Numerical results confirm that the proposed method unifies and simplifies many previously intractable MIMO capacity problems and reveals how the Fisher information alone governs the channel's asymptotic behavior.