Abstract
This paper analyses the error rate performance of distributed transmit beamforming (DTB). We derive new simple asymptotic (in the number of transmit nodes N) closed-form average bit error rate (BER) expressions for M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) and M-ary phase shift keying (M-PSK) modulation schemes. Our results provide many useful insights, e.g., for fixed total transmit power: (i) the average BER of both M-QAM and M-PSK modulation schemes decreases exponentially with increasing number of nodes N, (ii) M-PSK requires more transmit nodes than M-QAM to achieve the same average BER. Moreover, Monte Carlo simulations are used to validate the accuracy of our analysis.