Spectral and energy efficiency analysis with massive MIMO systems

Massive MIMO systems which utilize a large number of antennas in base stations focus on fully exploiting spatial resources, improving the performance of spectral efficiency and energy efficiency. However, antenna hardware impairments in the transmitter exist even for high-quality RF chains, as shown in Studer et al, WSA 2010,which affects the performance of the whole system. In this paper, a massive MIMO system model with multiple cells and multiple users is proposed in which spectral efficiency and energy efficiency with hardware impairment and pilot contamination is analyzed. The total energy consumption of the system includes both transmitted power and required to drive the link circuit power. Through numerical analysis, we draw some conclusions, RF impairment reduces the performance of spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency, increasing the number of antenna does not always improve the energy efficiency. Reducing pilot contamination effectively improve the efficiency of spectral and energy. The antenna's number which can achieve the maximum energy efficiency based on user, transmission power both for signal and pilot, distance principally.