Hardware-friendly two-stage spatial equalization for all-digital mm-wave massive MU-MIMO

Next generation wireless communication systems are expected to combine millimeter-wave communication with massive multi-user multiple-input multiple-output technology. All-digital base-station implementations for such systems need to process high-dimensional data at extremely high rates, which results in excessively high power consumption. In this paper, we propose two-stage spatial equalizers that first reduce the problem dimension by means of a hardware-friendly, low-resolution linear transform followed by spatial equalization on a lower-dimensional signal. We consider adaptive and non-adaptive dimensionality reduction strategies and demonstrate that the proposed two-stage spatial equalizers are able to approach the performance of conventional linear spatial equalizers that directly operate on high-dimensional data, while offering the potential to reduce the power consumption of spatial equalization

Finite-Alphabet Wiener Filter Precoding for mmWave Massive MU-MIMO Systems

Power consumption of multi-user (MU) precoding is a major concern in all-digital massive MU multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) base-stations with hundreds of antenna elements operating at millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies. We propose to replace part of the linear Wiener filter (WF) precoding matrix by a finite-alphabet WF precoding (FAWP) matrix, which enables the use of low-precision hardware that consumes low power and area. To minimize the performance loss of our approach, we present methods that efficiently compute FAWP matrices that best mimic the WF precoder. Our results show that FAWP matrices approach infinite-precision error-rate and error-vector magnitude performance with only 3-bit precoding weights, even when operating in realistic mmWave channels. Hence, FAWP is a promising approach to substantially reduce power consumption and silicon area in all-digital mmWave massive MU-MIMO systems.Comment: Presented at the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, 201

Capacity Bounds for Communication Systems with Quantization and Spectral Constraints

Low-resolution digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters (DACs and ADCs) have attracted considerable attention in efforts to reduce power consumption in millimeter wave (mmWave) and massive MIMO systems. This paper presents an information-theoretic analysis with capacity bounds for classes of linear transceivers with quantization. The transmitter modulates symbols via a unitary transform followed by a DAC and the receiver employs an ADC followed by the inverse unitary transform. If the unitary transform is set to an FFT matrix, the model naturally captures filtering and spectral constraints which are essential to model in any practical transceiver. In particular, this model allows studying the impact of quantization on out-of-band emission constraints. In the limit of a large random unitary transform, it is shown that the effect of quantization can be precisely described via an additive Gaussian noise model. This model in turn leads to simple and intuitive expressions for the power spectrum of the transmitted signal and a lower bound to the capacity with quantization. Comparison with non-quantized capacity and a capacity upper bound that does not make linearity assumptions suggests that while low resolution quantization has minimal impact on the achievable rate at typical parameters in 5G systems today, satisfying out-of-band emissions are potentially much more of a challenge.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 202