In future high-capacity wireless systems based on mmWave or massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO), the power consumption of receiver Analog to Digital Converters (ADC) is a concern. Although hybrid or analog systems with fewer ADCs have been proposed, fully digital receivers with many lower resolution ADCs (and lower power) may be a more versatile solution. In this paper, focusing on an uplink scenario, we propose to take the optimization of ADC resolution one step further by enabling variable resolutions in the ADCs that sample the signal received at each antenna. This allows to give more bits to the antennas that capture the strongest incoming signal and fewer bits to the antennas that capture little signal energy and mostly noise. Simulation results show that, depending on the unquantized link SNR, a power saving in the order of 20-80 can be obtained by our variable resolution proposal in comparison with a reference fully digital receiver with a fixed low number of bits in all its ADCs.
The wide bandwidth and large number of antennas used in millimeter wave systems put a heavy burden on the power consumption at the receiver. In this paper, using an additive quantization noise model, the effect of analog-digital conversion (ADC) resolution and bandwidth on the achievable rate is investigated for a multi-antenna system under a receiver power constraint. Two receiver architectures, analog and digital combining, are compared in terms of performance. Results demonstrate that: (i) For both analog and digital combining, there is a maximum bandwidth beyond which the achievable rate decreases; (ii) Depending on the operating regime of the system, analog combiner may have higher rate but digital combining uses less bandwidth when only ADC power consumption is considered, (iii) digital combining may have higher rate when power consumption of all the components in the receiver front-end are taken into account. In this paper, the effects of receive signal quantization on the channel capacity and the performance of error control coding in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems are investigated. The receive antennas of a MIMO system experience a channel-dependent superposition of modulated signals originating from all transmit antennas. A fine-granular analog to digital conversion of the resulting irregular constellation is difficult to obtain in practice. The quantization is therefore likely to be rather coarse. It turns out, however, that the loss in channel capacity due to coarse quantization is surprisingly small. On the other hand, existing coding schemes do not seem to tolerate coarse quantization gracefully, producing rather high error floors. Closing the huge gap between information theoretic opportunities offered by coarse quantized MIMO systems on the one hand, and the actual poor performance of coding schemes which are designed without signal quantization in mind, remains a challenging task.  This paper considers automatic gain control (AGC) and quantization for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems. We examine the effect of clipping and quantization on capacity and bit error rate (BER). We find that even quite low resolution quantizers can perform close to the capacity of ideal unquantized systems. Results are presented for BPSK and M-ary QAM, and for 2times2, 3times3, and 4times4 MIMO configurations. We find that in each case less than 6 quantizer bits are required to achieve 98 of unquantized capacity for SNRs above 15 dB