Performance Analysis of Rate Splitting in Massive MIMO Systems with Low Resolution ADCs/DACs

In this paper, we propose rate-splitting (RS) multiple access to mitigate the effects of quantization noise (QN) inherent in low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and digitalto-analog converters (DACs). We consider the downlink (DL) of a multiuser massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system where the base station (BS) is equipped with low-resolution ADCs/DACs. The BS employs the RS scheme for data transmission. Under imperfect channel state information (CSI), we characterize the spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) by deriving the asymptotic signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR). For 1-bit resolution, the QN is very high, and the RS scheme shows no rate gain over the non-RS scheme. As the ADC/DAC resolution increases (i.e., 2-3 bits), the RS scheme achieves higher SE in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime compared to that of the non-RS scheme. For a 3-bit resolution, the number of antennas can be reduced by 27% in the RS scheme to achieve the same SE as the non-RS scheme. Low-resolution DACs degrades the system performance more than low-resolution ADCs. Hence, it is preferable to equip the system with low-resolution ADCs than low-resolution DACs. The system achieves the best SE/EE tradeoff for 4-bit resolution ADCs/DACs.