Low-Resolution Massive MIMO Under Hardware Power Consumption Constraints

TL;DR

This paper investigates the trade-offs in low-resolution massive MIMO systems under power constraints, showing that many antennas with 2-3 bit ADCs/DACs can enhance performance.

Contribution

It provides a realistic power consumption model and analyzes the performance of low-resolution massive MIMO with channel estimation using Bussgang decomposition.

Findings

Performance improves with many low-resolution antennas.

2-3 bit ADCs/DACs are sufficient for good performance.

Uplink and downlink rates are characterized under power constraints.

Abstract

We consider a fully digital massive multiple-input multiple-output architecture with low-resolution analog-to-digital/digital-to-analog converters (ADCs/DACs) at the base station (BS) and analyze the performance trade-off between the number of BS antennas, the resolution of the ADCs/DACs, and the bandwidth. Assuming a hardware power consumption constraint, we determine the relationship between these design parameters by using a realistic model for the power consumption of the ADCs/DACs and the radio frequency chains. Considering uplink pilot-aided channel estimation, we build on the Bussgang decomposition to derive tractable expressions for uplink and downlink ergodic achievable sum rates. Numerical results show that the ergodic performance is boosted when many BS antennas with very low resolution (i.e., 2 to 3 bits) are adopted in both the uplink and the downlink.