Performance of Quantized Massive MIMO with Fronthaul Rate Constraint over Quasi-Static Channels

Journal article, 2023

We provide a rigorous framework for characterizing and numerically evaluating the error probability achievable in the uplink and downlink of a fully digital quantized multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. We assume that the system operates over a quasi-static channel that does not change across the finite-length transmitted codewords, and only imperfect channel state information (CSI) is available at the base station (BS) and at the user equipments. The need for the novel framework developed in this paper stems from the fact that, for the quasi-static scenario, commonly used signal-to-interference-and-distortion-ratio expressions that depend on the variance of the channel estimation error are not relatable to any rigorous information-theoretic achievable-rate bound. We use our framework to investigate how the performance of a fully digital massive MIMO system subject to a fronthaul rate constraint, which imposes a limit on the number of samples per second produced by the analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters (ADCs and DACs), depends on the number of BS antennas and on the precision of the ADCs and DACs. In particular, we characterize, for a given fronthaul constraint, the trade-off between the number of antennas and the resolution of the data converters, and discuss how this trade-off is influenced by the accuracy of the available CSI. Our framework captures explicitly the cost, in terms of spectral efficiency, of pilot transmission—an overhead that the outage capacity, the classic asymptotic metric used in this scenario, cannot capture. We present extensive numerical results that validate the accuracy of the proposed framework and allow us to characterize, for a given fronthaul constraint, the optimal number of antennas and the optimal resolution of the converters as a function of the transmitted power and of the available CSI.