Phase error effects on distributed transmit beamforming for wireless communications

This paper investigates the impact of phase errors of beamforming networks on the performance of distributed transmit beamforming systems. Through multi-tone signal, wider band, models and the defined phase error percentage (PEP) of the beamforming networks, the distorted signal waveforms for different wider band occupying beamforming systems are presented. Furthermore, simulated bit error rates (BERs) are obtained to illustrate how the distributed array aperture sizes, the signal bandwidths, the PEPs, and the signal to noise ratios (SNRs) interact with each other. These studies are then used to provide some guidelines for wideband distributed transmit beamforming system design.