The Effects of Multiple Carrier Frequency Offsets on the Performance of Virtual MISO FSK Systems

In this letter, a virtual multiple-input single-output (VMISO) network employing non-coherent frequency shift keying (FSK) is considered. In the VMISO network, spatially separated single-antenna nodes transmit the same information cooperatively to a single receiver where each received signal is affected by an independent carrier frequency offset (CFO). The existing works in this area assume a perfect carrier synchronization between the nodes. However, in this letter, the effects of CFOs on the performance degradation of this network are analyzed. For that purpose, the expression for the probability of symbol error has been derived. The results indicate that the performance is degraded due to CFOs, which is dependent upon the magnitude of CFOs, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), number of transmitting nodes, and the modulation order of FSK. At high SNR, the CFOs affect the system severely and the performance margin is minimum.