Performance analysis of massive MIMO offshore system with distributed antenna subarrays

In this paper, we propose a transmission scheme of analog precoding for an offshore communication system with distributed antenna subarrays to serve multiple vessels. The proposed analog precoding scheme relies only on line-of-sight (LOS) components of the fading channels, since the accurate estimation of small-scale fading information is challenging due to the varying sea state of maritime wireless channels, such as reflection, scattering, and ducting effect. We derive an approximate expression for the ergodic achievable rate, and emphasize the multiplexing gain analysis of the whole system with a large antenna configuration. In addition, we derive the probability density function (PDF) of signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) and further obtain closed-form expressions of symbol error rate (SER). Monte Carlo simulations verify the theoretical analysis, and numerical results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed LOS-based analog precoding scheme for the distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) offshore system is extremely near to the limitation of system performance, i.e., the ideal situation without any interference.