Mixed-ADC Massive MIMO Detectors: Performance Analysis and Design Optimization

Using a very low-resolution analog-to-digital convertor (ADC) unit at each antenna can remarkably reduce the hardware cost and power consumption of a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. However, such a pure low-resolution ADC architecture also complicates parameter estimation problems such as time/frequency synchronization and channel estimation. A mixed-ADC architecture, where most of the antennas are equipped with low-precision ADCs while a few antennas have full-precision ADCs, can solve these issues and actualize the potential of the pure low-resolution ADC architecture. In this paper, we present a unified framework to develop a family of detectors over the massive MIMO uplink system with the mixed-ADC receiver architecture by exploiting probabilistic Bayesian inference. As a basic setup, an optimal detector is developed to provide a minimum mean-squared-error (MMSE) estimate on data symbols. Considering the highly nonlinear steps involved in the quantization process, we also investigate the potential for complexity reduction on the optimal detector by postulating the common \emph{pseudo-quantization noise} (PQN) model. In particular, we provide asymptotic performance expressions including the MSE and bit error rate for the optimal and suboptimal MIMO detectors. The asymptotic performance expressions can be evaluated quickly and efficiently; thus, they are useful in system design optimization. We show that in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, the distortion caused by the PQN model can be ignored, whereas in the high-SNR regime, such distortion may cause 1-bit detection performance loss. The performance gap resulting from the PQN model can be narrowed by a small fraction of high-precision ADCs in the mixed-ADC architecture.