Downlink performance of cooperative distributed antenna systems over Nakagami-m fading channels in multi-cell environment

In this paper, we investigate the downlink performance of cooperative distributed antenna systems (DAS) in multi-cell environment, including ergodic capacity, outage probability, and bit error rate (BER). Blanket transmission, all distributed antenna modules (DAMs) in one cell are utilized to transmit signals, is considered and can be seemed as virtual multiple-input single-output (V-MISO) system. The interference plus noise is considered as Gaussian noise with fixed variance by central limit theorem (CLT), while the channels are assumed to suffer from independent and identical Nakagami-m fading together with propagation path loss. From the perspective of information theory, the closed-form expressions for ergodic capacity and BER are derived via iterative method, while for outage probability, it is given through algebraic operations. Finally extensive simulations are performed to validate our theoretical analysis.