An SNR Approximation for Distributed Massive MIMO With Zero Forcing

In this letter, we present a new theoretical analysis of the performance of a massive MIMO network with distributed receive antennas. We consider the uplink of a cooperative cellular network that jointly detects signals from multiple transmitters with a large number of distributed antennas. Applying zero-forcing (ZF) across the receivers, we present our accurate approximation for the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of an arbitrary user with Rayleigh fading, path loss and shadowing. We further derive easy-to-evaluate closed-form expressions for the symbol error probability (SEP) and the achievable rate of an arbitrary user. Numerical examples highlight that our novel results provide accurate approximations for the performance of a distributed massive MIMO network.