Effect of steering error vector and angular power distributions on beamforming and transmit diversity systems in correlated fading channel

A comparative analysis of transmit diversity and beam-forming for linear and circular antenna arrays in a wireless communications system is presented. The objective is to examine the effect of random perturbations, angular power distributions on transmit diversity and beamforming system. The perturbations are modeled as additive random errors, following complex Gaussian multivariate distribution, to the antenna array steering vectors. Using outage probability, probability of error, and dynamic range of transmitter power as performance measures, we have shown significant effects of array perturbations on the two systems under spatially correlated Rayleigh fading channel. We also examine the effect of angular power distributions (uniform, truncated Gaussian, and truncated Laplacian), which corresponds to different propagation scenario, on the performance of the two systems. Results show that the central angle-of-arrival can have signi-cant impact on system performance. And the transmit di-versity system with truncated Laplacian distribution performs better as compared to other power distributions, and linear array is a prefer-able con-guration for transmit diversity system. We conclude that array perturbations must not be neglected in the design of transmit diversity and beamforming systems.