Receiver Design and SER Analysis of Massive MIMO Uplink With Mixed-Resolution ADCs

This paper is on the uplink communications of single-cell multi-user massive multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) systems with a mixture of 1-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and full-resolution ADCs. A new low-complexity linear combining scheme is proposed for the receiver at the base station (BS) to take into account the difference of the two ADC types. A symbol-wise decoding is derived to separately decode the information of each user and an analytical approximation is obtained for the symbol error rate (SER) of the proposed combining and decoding. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves significant performance improvement compared to the traditional maximum-ratio-combining (MRC) receiver.