The tremendous capacity gains promised by space division multiple access
(SDMA) depend critically on the accuracy of the transmit channel state
information. In the broadcast channel, even without any network interference,
it is known that such gains collapse due to interstream interference if the
feedback is delayed or low rate. In this paper, we investigate SDMA in the
presence of interference from many other simultaneously active transmitters
distributed randomly over the network. In particular we consider zero-forcing
beamforming in a decentralized (ad hoc) network where each receiver provides
feedback to its respective transmitter. We derive closed-form expressions for
the outage probability, network throughput, transmission capacity, and average
achievable rate and go on to quantify the degradation in network performance
due to residual self-interference as a function of key system parameters. One
particular finding is that as in the classical broadcast channel, the per-user
feedback rate must increase linearly with the number of transmit antennas and
SINR (in dB) for the full multiplexing gains to be preserved with limited
feedback. We derive the throughput-maximizing number of streams, establishing
that single-stream transmission is optimal in most practically relevant
settings. In short, SDMA does not appear to be a prudent design choice for
interference-limited wireless networks.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication