Performance analysis of distributed MIMO with ZF receivers over gamma shadowed correlated Rician fading channels

Abstract In this paper, we study the performance of distributed multiple-input multiple-output (D-MIMO) systems over correlated Rician/Gamma (RG) fading channels employing zero-forcing (ZF) receivers. Contrary to the existing works, we consider the arbitrary-rank deterministic Rician multipath fading and Gamma shadowing fading. Based on this fading model, the novel analytical expressions for the achievable sum rate (ASR), symbol error ratio (SER), and outage probability (OP) are derived, followed by the asymptotic performance at both high- and low- signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes. However, the final results involve special functions like Bessel, Meijer-G functions, which do not provide engineering insights for practical systems. To solve this problem, the approximate analyses for the ASR, SER, OP are executed using moment matching method. Finally, we perform the large-system analysis of the ASR and provide asymptotic expressions when the number of antennas at the base station (BS) grows large, and when the number of antennas at both ends grows large with a fixed and finite ratio. It is demonstrated that the proposed approximate expressions accurately match with the analytical expressions, especially for massive MIMO systems.