Downlink Performance of Distributed Antenna Systems in MIMO Composite Fading Channel

In this paper, the capacity and BER performance of downlink distributed antenna systems (DAS) with transmit antenna selection and multiple receive antennas are investigated in MIMO composite channel, where path loss, Rayleigh fading and lognormal shadowing are all considered. Based on the performance analysis, using the probability density function (PDF) of the effective SNR and numerical integrations, tightly-approximate closed-form expressions of ergodic capacity and average BER of DAS are derived, respectively. These expressions have more accuracy than the existing expressions, and can match the simulation well. Besides, the outage capacity of DAS is also analyzed, and a tightly-approximate closed-form expression of outage capacity probability is derived. Moreover, a practical iterative algorithm based on Newton’s method for finding the outage capacity is proposed. To avoid iterative calculation, another approximate closed-form outage capacity is also derived by utilizing the Gaussian distribution approximation. With these theoretical expressions, the downlink capacity and BER performance of DAS can be effectively evaluated. Simulation results show that the theoretical analysis is valid, and consistent with the corresponding simulation.