Investigation of Channel Estimation Techniques with 1-bit Quantization and Oversampling for Multiple-Antenna Systems

Abstract

Large-scale multiple-antenna systems have been identified as a promising technology for the next generation of wireless systems. However, by scaling up the number of receive antennas the energy consumption will also increase. One possible solution is to use low-resolution analog-to-digital converters at the receiver. This paper considers large-scale multiple-antenna uplink systems with 1-bit analog-to-digital converters on each receive antenna. Since oversampling can partially compensate for the information loss caused by the coarse quantization, the received signals are firstly oversampled by a factor M. We then propose a low-resolution aware linear minimum mean-squared error channel estimator for 1-bit oversampled systems. Moreover, we characterize analytically the performance of the proposed channel estimator by deriving an upper bound on the Bayesian Cram\'er-Rao bound. Numerical results are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed channel estimator.