Spatio-Temporal Waveform Design for Multiuser Massive MIMO Downlink With 1-bit Receivers

Internet-of-Things (IoT) refers to a high-density network of low-cost, low-bitrate terminals and sensors where low energy consumption is also one central feature. As the power budget of classical receiver chains is dominated by the high-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), there is a growing interest toward deploying receiver architectures with reduced bit or even 1-bit ADCs. In this paper, we study waveform design, optimization, and detection aspects of multiuser massive MIMO downlink, where user terminals adopt very simple 1-bit ADCs with oversampling. In order to achieve spectral efficiency higher than 1 bit/s/Hz per real dimension, and per receiver antenna, we propose a two-stage precoding structure, namely, a novel quantization precoder followed by maximum-ratio transmission or zero-forcing-type spatial channel precoder which jointly form the multiuser multiantenna transmit waveform. The quantization precoder outputs are designed and optimized, under appropriate transmitter and receiver filter bandwidth constraints, to provide controlled intersymbol interference enabling the input symbols to be uniquely detected from 1-bit quantized observations with a low-complexity symbol detector in the absence of noise. An additional optimization constraint is also imposed in the quantization precoder design to increase the robustness against noise and residual interuser interference (IUI). The purpose of the spatial channel precoder, in turn, is to suppress the IUI and provide high beamforming gains such that good symbol error rates can be achieved in the presence of noise and interference. Extensive numerical evaluations illustrate that the proposed spatio-temporal precoder-based multiantenna waveform design can facilitate good multiuser link performance, despite the extremely simple 1-bit ADCs in the receivers, hence being one possible enabling technology for the future low-complexity IoT networks.