Multi-Cell Massive MIMO Systems with Low Resolution ADCs

Abstract

This paper investigates the achievable uplink spectral efficiency (SE) of multi-cell massive multi-input multioutput (MIMO) systems with the low-resolution analog-to-digital converter (ADC) receiver architecture. For the maximum ratio combining detector, we derive an approximate expression for the achievable SE of the system, which enables the characterization of the impact of key system parameters such as transmit power, the number of antennas, and the ADC resolution bits on the achievable SE. Moreover, simple power scaling laws are presented.