Outage Probability Analysis and Resolution Profile Design for Massive MIMO Uplink With Mixed-ADC

This paper analyzes the outage probability for the uplink of multi-user massive multi-input-multi-output systems with a mixed analog-to-digital converter (ADC) architecture, in which the base station (BS) is equipped with ADCs of different resolution levels. Maximum-ratio combining (MRC) is used at the BS. By deriving the distribution of the user-interference power and statistical properties of other components in the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR), a tight closed-form approximation for the outage probability is obtained for a general mixed ADC structure with any resolution profile. Then, two methods for the ADC resolution profile optimization are proposed considering both the outage probability and the BS energy consumption. The first method uses low-complexity incremental search to minimize the BS energy consumption for given outage probability constraint. The other method is based on multi-objective optimization and adopts a discrete-variation of the classic non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II). Numerical results are presented to validate the outage probability results. Furthermore, it is shown that the two proposed mixed-resolution ADC designs largely outperform a two-level ADC structure and provide more choices than the uniform ADC structure for resolving the tradeoff between outage probability and BS energy consumption.