On Optimal Strategies for Joint Reciprocity Calibration in Distributed MIMO

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of reciprocity calibration errors on the downlink spectral efficiency (SE) of multi-user large antenna systems. Specifically, we consider two calibration approaches: (a) global calibration, in which all antennas (can be distributed access-points (APs)) in the system cooperatively perform calibration, and (b) local calibration, wherein only a subset of antennas involved in downlink beamforming performs calibration. We derive the downlink SE considering the use-and-then-forget bound and side-information bound, and then demonstrate that, when downlink pilots are employed (in the case of side-information bound), the global calibration outperforms local calibration for arbitrary calibration topologies.

arXiv comment5 pages, 1 figure, Accepted to the 34th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO 2026)