Energy Efficiency of Massive MIMO Systems With Low-Resolution ADCs and Successive Interference Cancellation

This paper studies the influence of signal detection schemes on the energy efficiency (EE) of uplink multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). Assuming equal transmission rates for all users, we derive the optimal power allocation and their analytical approximations for zero-forcing (ZF) and ZF successive interference cancellation (ZF-SIC) receivers. Both the cases with perfect channel state information (CSI) and with imperfect CSI are considered. The EE with different receivers is compared. The results indicate that for uplink massive MIMO systems with low-resolution ADCs, the radio-frequency circuit power consumption can be significant because a large number of antennas are required to compensate for the loss due to quantization errors while the number of base station antennas needed with the ZF-SIC receiver is significantly smaller than that with the ZF receiver. Meanwhile, the increase of power consumption of signal processing with ZF-SIC can be moderate, due to the fact that the receiver weights are reused in a coherent block and the dimensionality is reduced. Consequently, the ZF-SIC receiver is able to improve the overall EE for massive MIMO systems with practical ADCs. We also conduct an approximation analysis for a multi-cell scenario with the pilot contamination and inter-cell-interference considered.