On the Performance of Massive MIMO Systems With Low-Resolution ADCs Over Rician Fading Channels (1906.09841v1)

Abstract: This paper considers uplink massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with lowresolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) over Rician fading channels. Maximum-ratio-combining (MRC) and zero-forcing (ZF) receivers are considered under the assumption of perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI). Low-resolution ADCs are considered for both data detection and channel estimation, and the resulting performance is analyzed. Asymptotic approximations of the spectrum efficiency (SE) for large systems are derived based on random matrix theory. With these results, we can provide insights into the trade-offs between the SE and the ADC resolution and study the influence of the Rician K-factors on the performance. It is shown that a large value of K-factors may lead to better performance and alleviate the influence of quantization noise on channel estimation. Moreover, we investigate the power scaling laws for both receivers under imperfect CSI and it shows that when the number of base station (BS) antennas is very large, without loss of SE performance, the transmission power can be scaled by the number of BS antennas for both receivers while the overall performance is limited by the resolution of ADCs. The asymptotic analysis is validated by numerical results. Besides, it is also shown that the SE gap between the two receivers is narrowed down when the K-factor is increased. We also show that ADCs with moderate resolutions lead to better energy efficiency (EE) than that with high-resolution or extremely low-resolution ADCs and using ZF receivers achieve higher EE as compared with the MRC receivers.