Error performance of transmit beamforming with delayed and limited feedback

Feedback delay can severely affect the performance of transmit beamforming (TB) and the analytical quantification of the performance degradation has attracted much research interest recently. In this letter, we study the effect of delayed and limited-rate codebook index feedback on the error rate performance of TB systems over Rayleigh fading channels. We derive closed-form expressions for the moment generating function (MGF) and the probability density function (PDF) of the receiver output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) including the effects of outdated and finite-rate feedback and further provide accurate analytical error rate expressions, which are verified by simulation results. The coding gain gap between the full-rate and limited-rate feedback and the coding gain advantage of multiple transmit antennas to the single antenna are analyzed, for limited and delayed feedback. These results are simple and concise and provide new analytical insight into the achievable diversity and combining gains and the loss caused by feedback delay for different system parameters and modulation formats.