Analytical Performance Evaluation of Beamforming Under Transceivers Hardware Imperfections

In this paper, we provide the mathematical framework to evaluate and quantify the performance of wireless systems, which employ beamforming, in the presence of hardware imperfections at both the basestation and the user equipment. In more detail, by taking a macroscopic view of the joint impact of hardware imperfections, we introduce a general model that accounts for transceiver impairments in beamforming transmissions. In order to evaluate their impact, we present novel closed form expressions for the outage probability and upper bounds for the characterization of the system's capacity. Our analysis reveals that the level of imperfection can significantly constraint the ergodic capacity. Therefore, it is important to take them into account when evaluating and designing beamforming systems.