Uplink Performance of Wideband Massive MIMO with One-Bit ADCs

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the spectral efficiency of wideband massive MIMO systems with one-bit ADCs, showing they perform well despite quantization errors, especially as the number of channel taps increases.

Contribution

It derives a closed-form lower bound on capacity for wideband massive MIMO with one-bit ADCs, accounting for channel taps and quantization errors, demonstrating system viability.

Findings

Circularly symmetric quantization error becomes Gaussian and vanishes with many antennas.

Amplitude distortion due to interference diminishes as channel taps increase.

OFDM performance approaches single-carrier transmission in wideband massive MIMO.

Abstract

Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) stand for a significant part of the total power consumption in a massive MIMO base station. One-bit ADCs are one way to reduce power consumption. This paper presents an analysis of the spectral efficiency of single-carrier and OFDM transmission in massive MIMO systems that use one-bit ADCs. A closed-form achievable rate, i.e., a lower bound on capacity, is derived for a wideband system with a large number of channel taps that employs low-complexity linear channel estimation and symbol detection. Quantization results in two types of error in the symbol detection. The circularly symmetric error becomes Gaussian in massive MIMO and vanishes as the number of antennas grows. The amplitude distortion, which severely degrades the performance of OFDM, is caused by variations between symbol durations in received interference energy. As the number of channel taps grows, the amplitude distortion vanishes and OFDM has the same performance as single-carrier transmission. A main conclusion of this paper is that wideband massive MIMO systems work well with one-bit ADCs.