Spectral Efficiency with One-Bit Transmitters under Out-of-Band Power Constraints

Low-resolution transceivers are being considered for millimeter-wave and higher frequency communications because of their simplicity and low power consumption. However, the non-linearities introduced by low-resolution digital-to-analog con- verters at the transmitters can cause significant out-of-band emissions since traditional bandwidth-limited pulse-shaping is not generally available. We model the performance of a low- resolution transmitter in terms of its spectral efficiency under out- of-band emission constraints. We show that the spectral efficiency can increase linearly with the symbol rate while satisfying out- of-band constraint. This implies that in order to achieve a given spectral efficiency under the bandwidth constraint, the symbol rate of the transmitter should be larger than a threshold. We derive an upper bound on this threshold.