Analysis of Massive MIMO With Hardware Impairments and Different Channel Models

TL;DR

This paper investigates the fundamental performance limits of massive MIMO systems in 5G, analyzing the effects of hardware impairments, channel models, and system parameters through simulations and analytical methods.

Contribution

It provides new analytical approximations that explicitly relate system performance to hardware impairments, antenna count, user number, and transmit power in massive MIMO.

Findings

Hardware impairments significantly degrade SINR and sum rate.

Performance improves with increased antenna count and optimized precoding.

Analytical models accurately predict the impact of impairments and system parameters.

Abstract

Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) is foreseen to be one of the main technology components in next generation cellular communications (5G). In this paper, fundamental limits on the performance of downlink massive MIMO systems are investigated by means of simulations and analytical analysis. Signal-to-noise-and-interference ratio (SINR) and sum rate for a single-cell scenario multi-user MIMO are analyzed for different array sizes, channel models, and precoding schemes. The impact of hardware impairments on performance is also investigated. Simple approximations are derived that show explicitly how the number of antennas, number of served users, transmit power, and magnitude of hardware impairments affect performance.