On Performance Loss of DOA Measurement Using Massive MIMO Receiver With Mixed-ADCs

High hardware cost and high power consumption of massive multiple-input and multiple output (MIMO) are two challenges for the future wireless communications including sixth generation (6G). Adopting the low-resolution analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is viewed as a promising solution. Additionally, the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is an indispensable technology for beam alignment and tracking in massive MIMO systems. Thus, in this letter, the performance of DOA estimation with mixed-ADC structure is firstly investigated. The Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for this architecture is derived based on the additive quantization noise model. Eventually, a performance loss factor and the associated energy efficiency factor is defined for analysis in detail. Simulation results show that the mixed-ADC architecture can strike a good balance among performance loss, circuit cost and energy efficiency. More importantly, just a few bits (up to 4 bits) of low-resolution ADCs can achieve a satisfactory performance for DOA measurement.