Asymptotic Analysis for Low-Resolution Massive MIMO Systems with MMSE Receiver

Abstract: The uplink achievable rate of massive multiple- input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where the low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are assumed to equip at the base station (BS), is investigated in this paper. We assume that only imperfect channel station information is known at the BS. Then a new MMSE receiver is designed by taking not only the Gaussian noise, but also the channel estimation error and quantizer noise into account. By using the Stieltjes transform of random matrix, we further derive a tight asymptotic equivalent for the uplink achievable rate with proposed MMSE receiver. We present a detailed analysis for the number of BS antennas through the expression of the achievable rates and validate the results using numerical simulations. It is also shown that we can compensate the performance loss due to the low-resolution quantization by increasing the number of antennas at the BS.