Outage Probability and Ergodic Capacity of Distributed Transmit Beamforming With Imperfect CSI

In this paper, we present unified performance analysis framework of distributed transmit beamforming (DTB) with residual phase errors which arise from various sources such as imperfect synchronization and channel feedback quantization. More specifically, we derive statistics of the receive signal-to-noise ratio of DTB in Rayleigh and Rician fading channels in the presence of residual phase errors. In the case of residual phase errors caused by channel feedback quantization, we show that the distribution of residual phase errors can be modeled by uniform distribution in Rayleigh fading channels and Gaussian distribution in Rician fading channels. Also, our results reveal that a small number of bits are sufficient for quantized feedback to achieve comparable performance to DTB with perfect channel feedback. Finally, capitalizing on the derived statistics, we present closed-form expressions for the outage probability and the ergodic capacity of DTB with quantized channel feedback. Refereed/Peer-reviewed