On the energy efficiency of massive MIMO systems with low-resolution ADCs and lattice reduction aided detectors

As an effective technology for boosting the performance of wireless communications, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems based on symmetric antenna arrays have been extensively studied. Using low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) at the receiver can greatly reduce hardware costs and circuit complexity to further improve the energy efficiency (EE) of the system. There are significant research on the design of MIMO detectors but there is limited study on their performance in terms of EE. This paper studies the effect of signal detection on the EE in practical systems, and proposes to apply several signal detectors based on lattice reduction successive interference cancellation (LR-SIC) to massive MIMO systems with low-precision ADCs. We report results on their achievable EE in fading environments with typical modeling of the path loss and detailed analysis of the power consumption of the transceiver circuits. It is shown that the EE-optimal solution depends highly on the application scenarios, e.g., the number of antennas employed, the cell size, and the signal processing efficiency. Consequently, the signal detector must be properly selected according to the application scenario to maximize the system EE. In addition, medium-resolution ADCs should be selected to balance their own power consumption and the associated nonlinear distortion to maximize the EE of system.