Performance and design of uplink multiuser massive MIMO with low-resolution ADCs

Abstract

This letter investigates the performance and the design of fully-digitized, uplink multiuser massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). We analyze the effects of quantization errors when low-resolution ADCs are applied to uplink multiuser massive MIMO systems for reducing power consumption. We derive appropriate decoding parameters to estimate channel bit log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) by taking the power of quantization errors and channel estimation errors into account. The simulation results reveal that lower bit error rates (BERs) can be achieved by enhancing the number of receiving antennas and reducing the number of quantization bits for given spatial correlation matrices.