Spatio-Temporal Waveform Design for Multi-user Massive MIMO Downlink with 1-bit Receivers

Internet-of-Things (IoT) refers to a high-density network of low-cost low-bitrate terminals and sensors where also low energy consumption is one central feature. As the power-budget of classical receiver chains is dominated by the high-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), there is a growing interest towards deploying receiver architectures with reduced-bit or even 1-bit ADCs. In this paper, we study waveform design, optimization and detection aspects of multi-user massive MIMO downlink where user terminals adopt very simple 1-bit ADCs with oversampling. In order to achieve spectral efficiency higher than 1 bit/s/Hz per real-dimension, we propose a two-stage precoding, namely a novel quantization precoder followed by maximum-ratio transmission (MRT) or zero-forcing (ZF) type spatial channel precoder which jointly form the multi-user-multiantenna transmit waveform. The quantization precoder outputs are optimized, under appropriate transmitter and receiver filter bandwidth constraints, to provide controlled inter-symbol-interference (ISI) enabling the input symbols to be uniquely detected from 1-bit quantized observations with a low-complexity symbol detector in the absence of noise. An additional optimization constraint is also imposed in the quantization precoder design to increase the robustness against noise and residual inter-user-interference (IUI). The purpose of the spatial channel precoder, in turn, is to suppress the IUI and provide high beamforming gains such that good symbol-error rates (SERs) can be achieved in the presence of noise and interference. Extensive numerical evaluations illustrate that the proposed spatio-temporal precoder based multiantenna waveform design can facilitate good multi-user link performance, despite the extremely simple 1-bit ADCs in the receivers, hence being one possible enabling technology for the future low-complexity IoT networks.