Performance evaluation of low complexity double-sided massive MIMO transceivers

In this paper, we consider downlink multi-user MIMO transmission in massive MIMO systems, assuming massive amount of antennas at transmitter- as well as receiver-side. We investigate the performance of several linear MIMO transceiver architectures of comparatively low complexity, since non-linear schemes of high complexity (e.g., maximum likelihood detection) appear infeasible with large numbers of transmit and/or receive antennas. The focus of our investigation lies on the impact of spatial antenna correlation on the achievable rate of the considered schemes. We derive achievable rate upper bounds that facilitate interpretation and explanation of performance losses observed with increasing antenna correlation and with growing number of antennas and spatially multiplexed users. We identify favourable combinations of low complexity transmitter/receiver filters and show that the impact of antenna correlation strongly depends on the applied transceiver architecture.