Analysis of Hardware-Impaired Multi-cell Massive MIMO With Rician Fading And Phase Shifts

We consider a practical hardware-impaired multi-cell massive multi-input multi-output (mMIMO) system with spatially-correlated Rician fading channels, whose line-of-sight component experiences a random phase-shift. The multi -cell mMIMO system employs two-layer large-scale fading decoding (LSFD) to mitigate the interference due to pilot contamination. We consider a dynamic analog-to-digital converter (ADC) architecture at the base stations (BSs), which enables us to independently vary the resolution of ADC connected to each of its antenna, and thus properly choose them to achieve a high spectral efficiency (SE). Both BS and user equipments (UEs) are also equipped with low-cost radio frequency chains, which introduce additional hardware impairments. We first derive a closed-form SE expression for this system, and then optimize the LSFD vectors to maximize the sum SE metric using generalized Rayleigh quotient. We investigate the ADC resolution and hardware impairments values for which LSFD is highly effective, and the values for which its effectiveness reduces.