Achievable Rate of Rician Large-Scale MIMO Channels with Transceiver Hardware Impairments

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the impact of hardware impairments on the achievable rate of Rician large-scale MIMO channels, revealing that large-scale MIMO can mitigate impairment effects and maintain high spectral efficiency.

Contribution

It provides new closed-form expressions for achievable rates over Rician channels, highlighting the effects of hardware impairments and the benefits of large-scale MIMO systems.

Findings

Regular MIMO systems have a finite rate ceiling regardless of power.

In LS-MIMO, the rate loss depends on the Rician K-factor.

LS-MIMO can achieve high spectral efficiency despite impairments.

Abstract

Transceiver hardware impairments (e.g., phase noise, in-phase/quadrature-phase (I/Q) imbalance, amplifier non-linearities, and quantization errors) have obvious degradation effects on the performance of wireless communications. While prior works have improved our knowledge on the influence of hardware impairments of single-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems over Rayleigh fading channels, an analysis encompassing the Rician fading channel is not yet available. In this paper, we pursue a detailed analysis of regular and large-scale (LS) MIMO systems over Rician fading channels by deriving new, closed-form expressions for the achievable rate to provide several important insights for practical system design. More specifically, for regular MIMO systems with hardware impairments, there is always a finite achievable rate ceiling, which is irrespective of the transmit power and fading conditions. For LS-MIMO systems, it is interesting to find that the achievable rate loss depends on the Rician $K$-factor, which reveals that the favorable propagation in LS-MIMO systems can remove the influence of hardware impairments. However, we show that the non-ideal LS-MIMO system can still achieve high spectral efficiency due to its huge degrees of freedom.