Power Efficient OFDM-mmWave Communications with Low Resolution and Subsampling ADC

Abstract

Due to the large swath of available bandwidth, millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum is potentially suitable to meet enhanced network capacity requirements of future generation communication systems. However, the high Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) sampling rate required to process wide band signals in the mmWave regime results in significant power consumption in the receiver hardware. In this work, an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based subsampling architecture is proposed to achieve power efficient receiver design. Subbanding in association with orthogonal spreading codes using subsampling technique reduces the high sampling rate requirement of the receiver. Power consumption in the receiver is further reduced by utilizing low resolution ADC with minimal degradation in Bit Error Rate (BER) performance. In addition to this, OFDM transmission with reduced number of Fast Fourier transform (FFT) points alleviates the multi-path effects significantly, and improves the spectral efficiency. The combined effect of ADC bit resolution and subsampling on the system error performance and power consumption is studied.