Linear Massive MIMO Precoders in the Presence of Phase Noise—A Large-Scale Analysis

We study the impact of phase noise on the downlink performance of a multiuser multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system, where the base station (BS) employs a large number of transmit antennas M. We consider a setup where the BS employs Mosc free-running oscillators, and M/Mosc antennas are connected to each oscillator. For this configuration, we analyze the impact of phase noise on the performance of zero forcing (ZF), regularized ZF, and matched filter precoders when M and the number of users K are asymptotically large, whereas the ratio M/K = β is fixed. We analytically show that the impact of phase noise on the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) can be quantified as an effective reduction in the quality of the channel state information (CSI) available at the BS when compared with a system without phase noise. As a consequence, we observe that as Mosc increases, the SINR performance of all considered precoders degrades. On the other hand, the variance of the random phase variations caused by the BS oscillators reduces with increasing Mosc. Through Monte Carlo simulations, we verify our analytical results and compare the performance of the precoders for different phase noise and channel noise variances. For all considered precoders, we show that when β is small, the performance of the setup where all BS antennas are connected to a single oscillator is superior to that of the setup where each BS antenna has its own oscillator. However, the opposite is true when β is large and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the users is low.