Stochastic Phased Array Performance Indicators for Quality-of-Service-Enhanced Massive MIMO

Abstract

In this paper, we show that the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at a base station (BS) equipped with an arbitrary physical array antenna can be expressed as a function of two fundamental figures-of-merit (FoMs): (I) the instantaneous effective gain (IEG), and (II) the beamforming-channel correlation (BCC). These two FoMs are functions of the array antenna layout, the antenna elements, the propagation channel and the applied signal processing algorithms, and hence they are random variables (RVs) in general. We illustrate that both FoMs provide essential insights for quality-of-service (QoS)-based phased array design by investigating their statistics for BSs applying full-digital (FD) zero forcing (ZF) beamforming. We evaluate various array designs and show that arrays with higher IEGs and a reduced probability of low BCCs can increase the ergodic sum rate and reduce the need for scheduling.