On the MIMO Capacity with Residual Transceiver Hardware Impairments
Paper in proceeding, 2014

Radio-frequency (RF) impairments in the transceiver hardware of communication systems (e.g., phase noise (PN), high power amplifier (HPA) nonlinearities, or in- phase/quadrature-phase (I/Q) imbalance) can severely degrade the performance of traditional multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Although calibration algorithms can partially compensate these impairments, the remaining distortion still has substantial impact. Despite this, most prior works have not analyzed this type of distortion. In this paper, we investigate the impact of residual transceiver hardware impairments on the MIMO system performance. In particular, we consider a transceiver impairment model, which has been experimentally validated, and derive analytical ergodic capacity expressions for both exact and high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). We demonstrate that the capacity saturates in the high-SNR regime, thereby creating a finite capacity ceiling. We also present a linear approximation for the ergodic capacity in the low-SNR regime, and show that impairments have only a second-order impact on the capacity. Furthermore, we analyze the effect of transceiver impairments on large-scale MIMO systems; interestingly, we prove that if one increases the number of antennas at one side only, the capacity behaves similar to the finite-dimensional case. On the contrary, if the number of antennas on both sides increases with a fixed ratio, the capacity ceiling vanishes; thus, impairments cause only a bounded offset in the capacity compared to the ideal transceiver hardware case.

hardware impairments

massive MIMO

MIMO

channel capacity

Author

Xinlin Zhang

Chalmers, Signals and Systems, Signal Processing and Biomedical Engineering

Michail Matthaiou

Chalmers, Signals and Systems, Signal Processing and Biomedical Engineering

Emil Björnson

Ericsson

Nokia

Mikael Coldrey

Nokia

M. Debbah

Nokia

IEEE International Conference on Communications, ICC 2014, Sydney, Australia

5299-5305 6884163
978-147992003-7 (ISBN)

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Communication Systems

Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

DOI

10.1109/ICC.2014.6884163

ISBN

978-147992003-7

More information

Latest update

11/19/2018