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Linear Precoder Design in Massive MIMO under Realistic Power Amplifier Consumption Constraint

The energy consumption of wireless networks is a growing concern. In massive MIMO systems, which are being increasingly deployed as part of the 5G roll-out, the power amplifiers in the base stations have a large impact in terms of power demands. Most of the current massive MIMO precoders are designed to minimize the transmit power. However, the efficiency of the power amplifiers depend on their operating regime with respect to their saturation regime, and the consumed power proves to be non-linearly related to the transmit power. Power consumption-based equivalents of maximum ratio transmission, zero-forcing, and regularized zero-forcing precoders are therefore proposed. We show how the structure of the solutions radically changes. While all antennas should be active in order to minimize the transmit power, we find on the contrary that a smaller number of antennas should be activated if the objective is the power consumed by the power amplifiers.