Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications and cell densification are the key
techniques for the future evolution of cellular systems beyond 5G. Although the
current mmWave radio designs are focused on hybrid digital and analog receiver
array architectures, the fully digital architecture is an appealing option due
to its flexibility and support for multi-user multiple-input multiple-output
(MIMO). In order to achieve reasonable power consumption and hardware cost, the
specifications of analog circuits are expected to be compromised, including the
resolution of analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and the linearity of
radio-frequency (RF) front end. Although the state-of-the-art studies focus on
the ADC, the nonlinearity can also lead to severe system performance
degradation when strong input signals introduce inter-modulation distortion
(IMD). The impact of RF nonlinearity becomes more severe with densely deployed
mmWave cells since signal sources closer to the receiver array are more likely
to occur. In this work, we design and analyze the digital IMD compensation
algorithm, and study the relaxation of the required linearity in the RF-chain.
We propose novel algorithms that jointly process digitized samples to recover
amplifier saturation, and relies on beam space operation which reduces the
computational complexity as compared to per-antenna IMD compensation.Comment: 2019 IEEE 20th International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances
in Wireless Communications (SPAWC