Mixed-ADC/DAC Multipair Massive MIMO Relaying Systems: Performance Analysis and Power Optimization

High power consumption and expensive hardware are two bottlenecks for practical massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) systems. One promising solution is to employ low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and digital-to-analog converters (DACs). In this paper, we consider a general multipair mMIMO relaying system with a mixed-ADC/DAC architecture, in which some antennas are connected to low-resolution ADCs/DACs, while the rest of the antennas are connected to high-resolution ADCs/DACs. Leveraging on the additive quantization noise model, both exact and approximate closed-form expressions for the achievable rate are derived. It is shown that the achievable rate can approach the unquantized one by using only 2-3 bits of resolutions. Moreover, a power scaling law is presented to reveal that the transmit power can be scaled down inversely proportional to the number of antennas at the relay. We further propose an efficient power allocation scheme by solving a complementary geometric programming problem. In addition, a tradeoff between the achievable rate and power consumption for different numbers of low-resolution ADCs/DACs is investigated by deriving the energy efficiency. Our results reveal that the large antenna array can be exploited to enable the mixed-ADC/DAC architecture, which significantly reduces the power consumption and hardware cost for practical mMIMO systems.