Achievable Rate of Rician Large-Scale MIMO Channels With Transceiver Hardware Impairments

Transceiver hardware impairments (e.g., phase noise, in-phase/quadrature-phase imbalance, amplifier nonlinearities, and quantization errors) have obvious degradation effects on the performance of wireless communications. While prior works have improved our knowledge of the influence of hardware impairments of single-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems over Rayleigh fading channels, an analysis encompassing the Rician fading channel is not yet available. In this paper, we pursue a detailed analysis of regular and large-scale (LS) MIMO systems over Rician fading channels by deriving new closed-form expressions for the achievable rate to provide several important insights for practical system design. More specifically, for regular MIMO systems with hardware impairments, there is always a finite achievable rate ceiling, which is irrespective of the transmit power and fading conditions. For LS-MIMO systems, it is interesting to find that the achievable rate loss depends on the Rician K- factor, which reveals that the favorable propagation in LS-MIMO systems can remove the influence of hardware impairments. However, we show that the nonideal LS-MIMO system can still achieve high spectral efficiency due to its huge degrees of freedom.