On the Performance of MRC Receiver with Unknown Timing Mismatch-A Large Scale Analysis

There has been extensive research on large scale multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems recently. However, there are many obstacles to achieve full potential of using large number of receive antennas. One of the main issues, which will be investigated thoroughly in this paper, is timing asynchrony among signals of different users. Most of the works in the literature, assume that received signals are perfectly aligned which is not practical. We develop a mathematical model that explicitly accounts for the timing mismatch among the received signals and shows the detrimental impact of asynchrony on the MRC receiver.