Downlink Performance of MRT-BD in Multiuser Massive MIMO with Low Resolution ADCs

The multiuser massive MIMO (multi-input multi-output) system using the low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) in the uplink is to realize low cost and power consumption demands, which, however, reduce the signal quality. Beamforming as a signal processing technique can supply high throughputs in the MIMO systems. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of low-resolution ADCs against the interference among the different streams in the uplink and the different users in downlink systems respectively, and propose the maximum ratio transmission - block diagonalization (MRT-BD) scheme as a kind of beamforming to evaluate the effects of low-resolution ADCs in the full digital massive MIMO system. The preliminary conclusion is that the MRT-BD scheme achieves our anticipation to make the rate achievable, even more than it in the infinite-resolution (no quantization) of BD case can be approached using ADCs with only a few bits of resolution.