Receiver Energy Efficiency and Resolution Profile Design for Massive MIMO Uplink With Mixed ADC

This paper considers the uplink of multiuser massive multi-input multi-output systems with a mixed analog-to-digital converter (ADC) architecture, in which the base station (BS) is equipped with ADCs of different resolution levels. While higher resolution, ADCs reduce the quantization error to improve the performance; they also incur higher energy. This paper studies the receive energy efficiency (EE) and the ADC resolution profile design under the maximum-ratio combining receiver. First, closed-form approximations for the spectral efficiency (SE) and receive EE are derived for a general mixed ADC structure. Then, the ADC resolution profile optimization problem that maximizes the receive EE with respect to SE requirement is formulated. An algorithm based on decremental searching and dynamic programming is proposed whose complexity is linear in the number of BS antennas. Numerical results verify that with the proposed design, the mixed-ADC receiver can have nearly the same SE performance as the all full-resolution one but with considerably lighter burden of energy consumption.