Low-Resolution ADCs for Wireless Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

With the rapid growth of wireless data traffic and antennas configuration, higher spectrum efficiency and lower power consumption processing have evoked remarkable attention from the research and industry community for the deployment of future wireless communication. It has become a heated topic quickly in recent years and gives rise to the widespread interest around the world. As a core technology of the fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication, massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) technology can fully exploit the space resources and greatly improve the spectral and energy efficiency. However, massive MIMO systems are faced with the problems of mass data processing, high hardware cost, and huge total power consumption. To cope with these problems, a useful solution is that the receiver equips with finite resolution analog-to-digital (ADC) converters. A large number of research results show that the low-resolution quantization technology brings significant performance within the allowable loss of capacity. This promising technique has attracted many scholars to do tremendous endeavor on it. As a motivation, we make a comprehensive survey about low-resolution ADCs for wireless communication. This paper summarizes the latest developments in the design of low-resolution communication systems, focusing on system performance analysis, some key technologies of the receiver, and typical application scenarios for the low-resolution ADCs. In view of the adverse effects caused by coarse quantization, some potential implementations are presented to alleviate this dilemma. Future research directions are also given and suggested in this paper. This overview contributes significantly to providing an informative and tutorial reference for the key technologies of low-resolution ADCs as well as its applications in practical systems.