Optimized Uniform Scalar Quantizers of Ternary ADCs for Large-Scale MIMO Communications

Large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (LS-MIMO), a promising technology for the future wireless networks to boost the network capacity, unavoidably faces hardware cost and power consumption issues due to a large number of high-resolution power-hungry analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) at the receiver side. The low-resolution ADCs have recently been proven to be an effective solution to cut down the system cost. This paper studies the LS-MIMO communication systems where three-level ADCs, so-called Ternary ADCs (T-ADCs), are employed to achieve better energy efficiency in some LS-MIMO configurations. The truncation limit of the uniform scalar quantizer of the T-ADCs is optimized to minimize the quantization distortion on the LS-MIMO received signal, and thus its performance approaches that of the well-known Lloyd-Max algorithm while offering lower complexity and better robustness. Furthermore, our proposed solution is independent of the number of antennas. The LS-MIMO systems' performance with the proposed T-ADCs is substantially improved over the conventional 3- σ uniform scalar quantizer in three different performance metrics - achievable rates, iterative decoding thresholds of pragmatic protograph low-density parity-check codes (LDPC), and the frame error rate (FER)/bit error rate (BER). Our energy efficiency investigation reveals that proposed T-ADCs attain better energy efficiency than that of the 1-bit ADCs and 2-bit ADCs when the ratio between the receiving antennas and the transmitting antennas is low and medium as the power consumption of ADCs and the transmission power are better balanced in comparison with one-bit ADCs and two-bit ADCs.