An Energy Efficiency Perspective on Massive MIMO Quantization

Abstract

One of the basic aspects of Massive MIMO (MaMi) that is in the focus of current investigations is its potential of using low-cost and energy-efficient hardware. It is often claimed that MaMi will allow for using analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) with very low resolutions and that this will result in overall improvement of energy efficiency. In this contribution, we perform a parametric energy efficiency analysis of MaMi uplink for the entire base station receiver system with varying ADC resolutions. The analysis shows that, for a wide variety of system parameters, ADCs with intermediate bit resolutions (4 - 10 bits) are optimal in energy efficiency sense, and that using very low bit resolutions results in degradation of energy efficiency.