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Massive MIMO Systems with Non-Ideal Hardware: Energy Efficiency, Estimation, and Capacity Limits
The use of large-scale antenna arrays can bring substantial improvements in
energy and/or spectral efficiency to wireless systems due to the greatly
improved spatial resolution and array gain. Recent works in the field of
massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) show that the user channels
decorrelate when the number of antennas at the base stations (BSs) increases,
thus strong signal gains are achievable with little inter-user interference.
Since these results rely on asymptotics, it is important to investigate whether
the conventional system models are reasonable in this asymptotic regime. This
paper considers a new system model that incorporates general transceiver
hardware impairments at both the BSs (equipped with large antenna arrays) and
the single-antenna user equipments (UEs). As opposed to the conventional case
of ideal hardware, we show that hardware impairments create finite ceilings on
the channel estimation accuracy and on the downlink/uplink capacity of each UE.
Surprisingly, the capacity is mainly limited by the hardware at the UE, while
the impact of impairments in the large-scale arrays vanishes asymptotically and
inter-user interference (in particular, pilot contamination) becomes
negligible. Furthermore, we prove that the huge degrees of freedom offered by
massive MIMO can be used to reduce the transmit power and/or to tolerate larger
hardware impairments, which allows for the use of inexpensive and
energy-efficient antenna elements.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 28 pages, 15
figures. The results can be reproduced using the following Matlab code:
https://github.com/emilbjornson/massive-MIMO-hardware-impairment
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