Massive Relaying Communication System Under IQ Imbalance and Hardware Manufacturing Problems

Abstract

Physical radio-frequency transceivers have hardware problems, such as hardware manufacturing defects and in-phase/quadrature-phase (IQ) imbalance. These problems can degrade the performance of communication systems. This paper investigates the performance of multipair massive antenna relaying (MP-MAR) communication system under IQ and hardware manufacturing problems, in which multiple pairs of users exchange information within pair. This paper analyzes the parameters for each problem separately and their impact on the proposed MP-MAR system. This paper also derives new closed-form expressions for the outage probability and ergodic capacity, accounting for hardware problems. The results show that hardware problems negatively affect the system performance, and that the problem of IQ is the most influential on the system performance. Also, the performance loss is small at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), but at high SNR, the signal-to-noise plus distortion ratios (SNDRs) ceiling is inversely proportional to the level of hardware problems. This stands in contrast to the ideal MP-MAR system in which the SNDR increases without bound at high SNR.