Performance Analysis of Massive MIMO with Low-Resolution ADCs

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the uplink performance of massive MIMO systems with low-resolution ADCs, proposing a MMSE receiver that accounts for quantization noise and deriving asymptotic spectral efficiency results.

Contribution

It introduces a novel MMSE receiver design for low-resolution ADC massive MIMO and derives asymptotic spectral efficiency using random matrix theory.

Findings

Low-resolution ADCs can still achieve high spectral efficiency with more antennas.

The proposed MMSE receiver effectively mitigates quantization noise.

Asymptotic analysis closely matches numerical simulations.

Abstract

The uplink performance of massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems where the base stations (BS) employ low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is analyzed. A high performance MMSE receiver that takes both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and quantization noise into consideration is designed, which works well for both cases of uniform resolution ADCs and non-uniform resolution ADCs. With the proposed MMSE receiver, we then employ the random matrix theory to derive the asymptotic equivalent of the uplink spectral efficiency (SE) of the system. Numerical results show the tightness of the asymptotic equivalent of the uplink SE, and massive MIMO with low-resolution ADCs can still achieve the satisfying uplink SE by increasing the number of antennas at BS.