Uplink Achievable Rate for Massive MIMO Systems With Low-Resolution ADC

Abstract

In this letter, we derive an approximate analytical expression for the uplink achievable rate of a massive multiinput multi-output (MIMO) antenna system when finite precision analog-digital converters (ADCs) and the common maximalratio combining technique are used at the receivers. To obtain this expression, we treat quantization noise as an additive quantization noise model. Considering the obtained expression, we show that low-resolution ADCs lead to a decrease in the achievable rate but the performance loss can be compensated by increasing the number of receiving antennas. In addition, we investigate the relation between the number of antennas and the ADC resolution, as well as the power-scaling law. These discussions support the feasibility of equipping highly economical ADCs with low resolution in practical massive MIMO systems.Index Terms-massive MIMO, quantization, AQNM, uplink rate, MRC.

Optimal pilot length for uplink massive MIMO systems with low-resolution ADC

“…Theorem 1 reveals the effect of several system parameters on the SE performance. In contrast to [5], Theorem 1 further involves the effect of channel estimate and also embraces [2] and [8] as special cases. Utilizing the expression in (17), we can investigate the optimal training length that should be allocated to maximize the uplink sum SE.…”

“…However, a substantial increase in hardware cost and power consumption especially from the ADC front-ends, hinder the realization of massive MIMO systems. This fact motivates the use of quantized MIMO systems where each receiver antenna uses a very lowresolution (e.g., 1-3 bits) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) [3][4][5]. Results in [3,5] demonstrated that the rate degradation due to the low-resolution ADCs can be compensated by increasing the number of receiving antennas.…”

“…This fact motivates the use of quantized MIMO systems where each receiver antenna uses a very lowresolution (e.g., 1-3 bits) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) [3][4][5]. Results in [3,5] demonstrated that the rate degradation due to the low-resolution ADCs can be compensated by increasing the number of receiving antennas. By evaluating the effect of ADC resolution and bandwidth on the achievable rate under a receiver power constraint, [4] also advocates the quantized MIMO architecture.…”

“…Note that the values of ρ (or α) depend on the number of quantization bits b, which can be found in [5]. The uplink transmission comprises two phases: training and data transmission phases.…”

On Performance of Quantized Transceiver in Multiuser Massive MIMO Downlinks

“…One is to exploit hybrid precoding with a very limited number of radio-frequency (RF) chains serving all antennas, like in [3]. Alternatively, each antenna element is as usual connected with a dedicated RF chain which is, however, served by lowresolution, or even 1-bit, ADC/DACs, e.g., [4].…”