Impact of hardware impairments on mmWave MIMO systems with hybrid precoding

A notable commonality in the existing studies on millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems is the assumption of perfect hardware during communication. However, this is a strong hypothesis since residual tranceiver hardware impairments (RTHIs) are inevitable in reality. Hence, this paper proposes a mmWave MIMO system that generalizes the state of the art by considering the inevitable RTHIs. We shed light on the impact of three major hardware impairments, namely, the multiplicative phase noise (PN), the amplified thermal noise (ATN), and the residual additive transceiver hardware impairments (RATHIs). In particular, we derive the spectral efficiency of the system under the presence of RTHIs. Additionally, we provide a detailed analysis to quantify the degradation caused to the spectral efficiency of the system by each separate impairment. Among the noteworthy outcomes is that the multiplicative PN is the most critical of the three impairments. Furthermore, we verify that the merits of the mmWave MIMO system are improved in line with large MIMO, which needs to be deployed in a cost-efficient manner.