Energy efficiency of mmWave massive MIMO precoding with low-resolution DACs

With the congestion of the sub-6 GHz spectrum, the interest in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems operating on millimeter wave spectrum grows. In order to reduce the power consumption of such massive MIMO systems, hybrid analog/digital transceivers and application of low-resolution digital-to-analog/analog-to-digital converters have been recently proposed. In this work, we investigate the energy efficiency of quantized hybrid transmitters equipped with a fully/partially-connected phase-shifting network composed of active/passive phase-shifters and compare it to that of quantized digital precoders. We introduce a quantized single-user MIMO system model based on an additive quantization noise approximation considering realistic power consumption and loss models to evaluate the spectral and energy efficiencies of the transmit precoding methods. Simulation results show that partially-connected hybrid precoders can be more energy-efficient compared to digital precoders, while fully-connected hybrid precoders exhibit poor energy efficiency in general. Also, the topology of phase-shifting components offers an energy-spectral efficiency trade-off: active phase-shifters provide higher data rates, while passive phase-shifters maintain better energy efficiency.Comment: Published in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processin

Performance Evaluation of Hybrid Precoder Design for Multi-User Massive MIMO Systems with Low-Resolution ADCs/DACs

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis and design of a hybrid precoding system tailored for mmWave multi-user massive MIMO systems in both downlink and uplink scenarios. The proposed system employs a two-stage precoding approach, incorporating UQ and NUQ techniques, along with low-resolution DACs in downlink and ADCs in uplink to address hardware limitations. The system considers Zero Forcing and Minimum Mean Square Error algorithms as digital precoding methods for the uplink scenario, while exploring the impact of different DAC resolutions on system performance. Extensive simulations reveal that the proposed system surpasses conventional analog beamforming methods, particularly in multi-user scenarios involving inter-user interference. In downlink, the system demonstrates a trade-off between SE and EE, achieving higher Energy Efficiency with NUQ. In uplink, NUQ and UQ converters exhibit similar performance trends regardless of the chosen combiner algorithm. The proposed system attains enhanced Spectral and Energy Efficiency while maintaining reduced complexity and overhead. The study significantly contributes to the advancement of efficient and effective mmWave multi-user massive MIMO systems by providing a thorough analysis of various quantization schemes and precoding techniques. The findings of this research are expected to aid in the optimization of 5G and beyond technologies, particularly in high-density deployment scenarios

Hybrid Precoder and Combiner Design with Low Resolution Phase Shifters in mmWave MIMO Systems

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications have been considered as a key technology for next generation cellular systems and Wi-Fi networks because of its advances in providing orders-of-magnitude wider bandwidth than current wireless networks. Economical and energy efficient analog/digial hybrid precoding and combining transceivers have been often proposed for mmWave massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems to overcome the severe propagation loss of mmWave channels. One major shortcoming of existing solutions lies in the assumption of infinite or high-resolution phase shifters (PSs) to realize the analog beamformers. However, low-resolution PSs are typically adopted in practice to reduce the hardware cost and power consumption. Motivated by this fact, in this paper, we investigate the practical design of hybrid precoders and combiners with low-resolution PSs in mmWave MIMO systems. In particular, we propose an iterative algorithm which successively designs the low-resolution analog precoder and combiner pair for each data stream, aiming at conditionally maximizing the spectral efficiency. Then, the digital precoder and combiner are computed based on the obtained effective baseband channel to further enhance the spectral efficiency. In an effort to achieve an even more hardware-efficient large antenna array, we also investigate the design of hybrid beamformers with one-bit resolution (binary) PSs, and present a novel binary analog precoder and combiner optimization algorithm with quadratic complexity in the number of antennas. The proposed low-resolution hybrid beamforming design is further extended to multiuser MIMO communication systems. Simulation results demonstrate the performance advantages of the proposed algorithms compared to existing low-resolution hybrid beamforming designs, particularly for the one-bit resolution PS scenario