Massive MIMO With Ternary ADCs

Massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system inevitably faces the hardware cost and energy efficiency problem due to its large number of antennas at the base station (BS). The use of low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), e.g., typical 1-bit ADCs, can effectively reduce the system cost. In this paper, we consider a massive MIMO uplink with ternary/three level ADCs. The design of typical linear combiner based detectors is given along with their analytical symbol-error-rate (SER) performance results. Analytical and simulation results show that 1) ternary ADCs can effectively compensate the SER performance gap between 1-bit and full-resolution ADCs; 2) optimal design of ternary ADCs for SER minimization can be referred to the existing design for quantization error minimization; 3) ternary ADCs perform better than 2-bit ADCs in energy efficiency. Thus, for some low-cost scenarios where implementing 2-bit ADCs for each antenna in massive MIMO may be even unaffordable, ternary ADC can be a good choice.