RF-chain ADC Resolution Trade-off in MIMO Hybrid Architecture

The problem of spectral efficiency maximization for hybrid analog/digital transceiver architecture, subject to both transmit and receiver power constraints, is considered. With the processing power constraint of the receiver, the number of radio frequency (RF) chains and analog-to-digital (ADC) resolution used greatly affect the achievable transmission rate. We formulate an optimization problem to find this trade-off, and provide an (a) efficient algorithm to solve it. Numerical results show that for power constrained hybrid receiver, there is a trade-off between the number of RF chains and the ADC resolution, that can obtain maximal spectral efficiency.