Performance analysis of distributed ZF beamforming in the presence of CFO

We study the effects of residual carrier frequency offset (CFO) on the performance of the distributed zero-forcing (ZF) beamformer. Coordinated transmissions, where multiple cells cooperate to simultaneously transmit toward one or multiple receivers, have gained much attention as a means to provide the spectral efficiency and data rate targeted by emerging standards. Such schemes exploit multiple transmitters to create a virtual array of antennas to mitigate the co-channel interference and provide the gains of multi-antenna systems. Here, we focus on a distributed scenario where the transmit nodes share the same data but have only the local knowledge of the channels. Considering the distributed nature of such schemes, time/frequency synchronization among the cooperating transmitters is required to guarantee good performance. However, due to the Doppler effect and the non-idealities inherent to the local oscillator embedded in each wireless transceiver, the carrier frequency at each transmitter deviates from the desired one. Even when the transmitters perform frequency synchronization before transmission, a residual CFO is to be expected that degrades the performance of the system due to the in-phase misalignment of the incoming streams. This paper presents the losses of the signal-to-noise ratio gain analytically and the diversity order semi-numerically of the distributed ZF beamformer for the ideal case and in the presence of a residual CFO. We illustrate our results and their accuracy through simulations.