Full-Duplex Cell-Free Massive MIMO With Low-Resolution ADCs

Abstract

This paper studies the sum spectral/energy efficiency (SE/EE) of a full-duplex (FD) cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) at the access points (APs) and the downlink (DL) users. We characterize the joint impact of the residual self-interference, inter-AP interference, uplink (UL)-to-DL interference, pilot contamination and quantization noise (QN) by deriving closed-form solutions for the UL/DL SE. It is shown that the UL SE loss due to the QN can be compensated by increasing the receiving antenna arrays. By contrast, in the DL, increasing the transmit antennas is ineffective in compensating for the DL SE loss. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the operating region of the FD CF massive MIMO is reduced as the ADCs’ resolution declines. We investigate the EE/SE trade-offs.