The impact of small synchronization errors on eigenmode transmission

Virtual MIMO systems depend on the exact cooperation among the nodes. Since perfect synchronization will never be feasible in practice, the impact of synchronization errors on a virtual MIMO system is an intriguing problem. Hence, we have investigated random synchronization errors that have the order of magnitude of a symbol interval when using eigenmode transmission. Our closed-form results show that synchronization errors will have an impact on the performance of MIMO systems. In the low SNR regime small imperfections play virtually no role. In contrast to that, in the high SNR regime significant performance losses may be encountered due to the average inter-stream interference.