  LISA is an array of three spacecraft flying in an approximately equilateral
triangle configuration, which will be used as a low-frequency detector of
gravitational waves. Recently a technique has been proposed for suppressing the
phase noise of the onboard lasers by locking them to the LISA arms. In this
paper we show that the delay-induced effects substantially modify the
performance of this technique, making it different from the conventional
locking of lasers to optical resonators. We analyze these delay-induced effects
in both transient and steady-state regimes and discuss their implications for
the implementation of this technique on LISA.
