A Comparison of Hybrid Beamforming and Digital Beamforming with Low-Resolution ADCs for Multiple Users and Imperfect CSI

For 5G it will be important to leverage the available millimeter wave spectrum. To achieve an approximately omni- directional coverage with a similar effective antenna aperture compared to state of the art cellular systems, an antenna array is required at both the mobile and basestation. Due to the large bandwidth and inefficient amplifiers available in CMOS for mmWave, the analog front-end of the receiver with a large number of antennas becomes especially power hungry. Two main solutions exist to reduce the power consumption: hybrid beam forming and digital beam forming with low resolution Analog to Digital Converters (ADCs). In this work we compare the spectral and energy efficiency of both systems under practical system constraints. We consider the effects of channel estimation, transmitter impairments and multiple simultaneous users. Our power consumption model considers components reported in literature at 60 GHz. In contrast to many other works we also consider the correlation of the quantization error, and generalize the modeling of it to non-uniform quantizers and different quantizers at each antenna. The result shows that as the SNR gets larger the ADC resolution achieving the optimal energy efficiency gets also larger. The energy efficiency peaks for 5 bit resolution at high SNR, since due to other limiting factors the achievable rate almost saturates at this resolution. We also show that in the multi-user scenario digital beamforming is in any case more energy efficient than hybrid beamforming. In addition we show that if different ADC resolutions are used we can achieve any desired trade-offs between power consumption and rate close to those achieved with only one ADC resolution.Comment: Submitted to JSTSP. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1610.0290

Low Power Analog-to-Digital Conversion in Millimeter Wave Systems: Impact of Resolution and Bandwidth on Performance

The wide bandwidth and large number of antennas used in millimeter wave systems put a heavy burden on the power consumption at the receiver. In this paper, using an additive quantization noise model, the effect of analog-digital conversion (ADC) resolution and bandwidth on the achievable rate is investigated for a multi-antenna system under a receiver power constraint. Two receiver architectures, analog and digital combining, are compared in terms of performance. Results demonstrate that: (i) For both analog and digital combining, there is a maximum bandwidth beyond which the achievable rate decreases; (ii) Depending on the operating regime of the system, analog combiner may have higher rate but digital combining uses less bandwidth when only ADC power consumption is considered, (iii) digital combining may have higher rate when power consumption of all the components in the receiver front-end are taken into account.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, in Proc. of IEEE Information Theory and Applications Workshop, Feb. 201

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

Context Information Based Initial Cell Search for Millimeter Wave 5G Cellular Networks

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication is envisioned as a cornerstone to fulfill the data rate requirements for fifth generation (5G) cellular networks. In mmWave communication, beamforming is considered as a key technology to combat the high path-loss, and unlike in conventional microwave communication, beamforming may be necessary even during initial access/cell search. Among the proposed beamforming schemes for initial cell search, analog beamforming is a power efficient approach but suffers from its inherent search delay during initial access. In this work, we argue that analog beamforming can still be a viable choice when context information about mmWave base stations (BS) is available at the mobile station (MS). We then study how the performance of analog beamforming degrades in case of angular errors in the available context information. Finally, we present an analog beamforming receiver architecture that uses multiple arrays of Phase Shifters and a single RF chain to combat the effect of angular errors, showing that it can achieve the same performance as hybrid beamforming