BER Performance of Uplink Massive MIMO With Low-Resolution ADCs

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the impact of low-resolution ADCs on uplink massive MIMO systems, showing that few-bit ADCs can achieve BER performance comparable to full-resolution ADCs, depending on modulation and antenna count.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of BER performance with low-resolution ADCs in massive MIMO, identifying optimal quantization levels for different configurations.

Findings

Low-resolution ADCs can match full-resolution BER performance.

Optimal quantization depends on modulation and antenna number.

Few-bit ADCs are cost-effective for massive MIMO deployments.

Abstract

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a promising technology for next generation wireless communication systems (5G). In this technology, Base Station (BS) is equipped with a large number of antennas. Employing high resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) for all antennas may cause high costs and high power consumption for the BS. By performing numerical results, we evaluate the use of low-resolution ADCs for uplink massive MIMO by analyzing Bit Error Rate (BER) performance for different detection techniques (MMSE, ZF) and different modulations (QPSK, 16-QAM) to find an optimal quantization resolution. Our results reveal that the BER performance of uplink massive MIMO systems with a few-bit resolution ADCs is comparable to the case of having full precision ADCs. We found that the optimum choice of quantization level (number of bits in ADCs) depends on the modulation technique and the number of antennas at the BS.