Spectral Efficiency of Massive MIMO Systems With Low-Resolution ADCs and MMSE Receiver

This letter considers an uplink multi-user massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system with non-uniform low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and minimum mean-square error receivers at the base station side. Additive quantization noise model is utilized to measure the effect of finite ADC resolution. Non-uniform quantization brings difficulty in obtaining the asymptotic equivalent expression of the spectral efficiency. Based on the random matrix theory, a closed-form asymptotic equivalent expression is derived. Numerical results show the tightness of the asymptotic equivalent. It also shows that massive antennas are able to compensate for the loss of low-resolution quantization, implying the capability of low-resolution ADCs in massive MIMO systems.