Full-Duplex Massive MIMO Relaying Systems With Low-Resolution ADCs

This paper considers a multipair amplify-and-forward massive MIMO relaying system with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) at both the relay and destinations. The channel state information (CSI) at the relay is obtained via pilot training, which is then utilized to perform simple maximum-ratio combining/maximum-ratio transmission processing by the relay. Also, it is assumed that the destinations use statistical CSI to decode the transmitted signals. Exact and approximated closed-form expressions for the achievable sum rate are presented, which enable the efficient evaluation of the impact of key system parameters on the system performance. In addition, optimal relay power allocation scheme is studied, and power scaling law is characterized. It is found that, with only low-resolution ADCs at the relay, increasing the number of relay antennas is an effective method to compensate for the rate loss caused by coarse quantization. However, it becomes ineffective to handle the detrimental effect of low-resolution ADCs at the destination. Moreover, it is shown that deploying massive relay antenna arrays can still bring significant power savings, i.e., the transmit power of each source can be cut down proportional to 1/M to maintain a constant rate, where M is the number of relay antennas.