Spectral Efficiency of Mixed-ADC Receivers for Massive MIMO Systems

This paper investigated the uplink of multi-user massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems with a mixed analog-to-digital converter (ADC) receiver architecture, in which some antennas are equipped with costly full-resolution ADCs and others with less expensive low-resolution ADCs. A closed-form approximation of the achievable spectral efficiency (SE) with the maximum-ratio combining (MRC) detector is derived. Based on this approximated result, the effects of the number of base station antennas, the transmit power, the proportion of full-resolution ADCs in the mixed-ADC structure, and the number of quantization bits of the low-resolution ADCs are revealed. Results showcase that the achievable SE increases with the number of BS antennas and quantization bits, and it converges to a saturated value in the high user power regime or the full ADC resolution case. Most important, this work efficiency verifies that for massive MIMO, the mixed-ADC receiver with a small fraction of full-resolution ADCs can have comparable SE performance with the receiver with all full-resolution ADCs but at a considerably lower hardware cost.

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