While the research literature is full of papers that design wireless communication systems under constraints on the maximum transmitted power, in practice, it might be constraints on the equivalent isotropically radiated power (EIRP) or the out-of-band radiation that limit the system operation.
Christopher Mollén recently defended his doctoral thesis entitled High-End Performance with Low-End Hardware: Analysis of Massive MIMO Base Station Transceivers. In the following video, he explains the basics of how the non-linear distortion from Massive MIMO transceivers is radiated in space.
What is the tolerable limit of phase drift from an individual transceiver so that the net throughput of the massive MIMO system is not disturbed?
This phase drift is chiefly due to the temperature variations in the external environment.
I cannot answer this exactly, but some guidelines are provided in the paper “Massive MIMO with Non-Ideal Arbitrary Arrays: Hardware Scaling Laws and Circuit-Aware Design” (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.0875). Since we estimate the channel once per coherence time, if the accumulated phase-drift during the coherence time is small, then it can be neglected and treated as part of the channel. However, if the accumulated phase-drift are large, then the channel estimate can become outdated, and we might benefit from sending pilots more often to deal with it. Alternatively, there are methods to track phase-drifts that could be applied.