Performance Analysis of Distributed Beamforming in a Spectrum Sharing System

In this paper, we consider a distributed beamforming scheme (DBF) in a spectrum sharing system where multiple secondary users share the spectrum with the licensed primary users under an interference temperature constraint. We assume that DBF is applied at the secondary users. We first consider optimal beamforming and compare it with the user selection scheme in terms of the outage probability and bit-error rate performance. Since perfect feedback is difficult to obtain, we then investigate a limited feedback DBF scheme and develop an outage probability analysis for a random vector quantization (RVQ) design algorithm. Numerical results are provided to illustrate our mathematical formalism and verify our analysis.