On Robust Millimeter Wave Line-of-Sight MIMO Communications With Few-Bit ADCs

Abstract

This work focuses on providing robust line-of-sight (LoS) spatial multiplexing at flexible communications distances and directions. Considering oblique LoS uniform linear arrays, we first derive the rank-deficient and orthogonal conditions for the LoS MIMO channel matrices. With this discovery, the topology of high spatial-resolution on one side of the link is shown with a wide full-rank-channel guarantee interval over distance and direction variations. Additionally, to reduce the implementation costs and power consumption, we propose to use low amplitude-resolution quantizers at the side of high spatial-resolution. With numerical evaluations on systems having few-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), the proposed system design is shown to simultaneously achieve a higher spectrum efficiency and higher energy efficiency compared to a conventional single-stream high-amplitude-resolution over a wide signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) range. Furthermore, we investigate channel equalization under the extreme case of using 1-bit ADCs. After providing a new viewpoint on the generalized approximate message passing (GAMP) algorithm from constrained Bethe free energy minimization, our simulations on bit-error-rates show that the GAMP algorithm can significantly reduce the performance degradation due to coarse quantization and can significantly outperform the Bussgang decomposition based linear minimum-mean-square-error estimator, especially at high SNRs.