Enhanced Signal Detection and Constellation Design for Massive SIMO Communications With 1-Bit ADCs

In this paper, we investigate a transmitter and receiver design for a single-user massive SIMO (single-input multiple-output) system with 1-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) at the base station (BS), where the user adopts higher-order modulation, e.g., 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM), for the data transmission. For the channel estimation and the signal detection, linear least-squares (LS) estimation and maximum ratio combining (MRC) are respectively employed. In this context, we first introduce closed-form formulas for the mean of the estimated symbols and for the correlation matrix between their real and imaginary parts considering the effect of 1-bit quantization. The study of the distribution of the estimated symbols indicates that, in presence of 1-bit ADCs, the conventional 16-QAM detector and the typical square 16-QAM modulation are not adequate. In light of this, we propose three novel symbol detectors and re-design the 16-QAM modulation in order to improve the symbol error rate (SER). Furthermore, the upper bound on the SER is analyzed based on the pair-wise error probability and the boundary equation between two regions is also studied. Through numerical results, the proposed framework, i.e., the symbol detector and the transmit constellation design, shows a significant enhancement in the SER performance against the conventional detector and the typical square 16-QAM modulation.