Joint Detection and Decoding of Mixed-ADC Large-Scale MIMO Communication Systems With Protograph LDPC Codes

Nowadays, large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (LS-MIMO) with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is a favorable transmission scheme for 5G and beyond wireless networks to reduce the power consumption of the radio frequency chains and to increase the network capacity. This paper derives the joint message-passing detection and decoding algorithm based on the double-layer graph for LS-MIMO communication systems with mixed-ADCs. The new protograph extrinsic information chart (PEXIT) algorithm is developed to analytically evaluate the performance of protograph low-density parity-check code under various mixed-ADC combinations and LS-MIMO configuration scenarios. The simulation results validate the accuracy of the proposed algorithm. Furthermore, our experiments show that the mixed-ADC system can achieve a significant power gain even when only one received antenna is equipped with high-resolution ADCs. It is observed that 4-bit or 5-bit resolution is an optimal choice for the high-resolution receive antennas. Interestingly, mixed-ADC systems with Ternay-ADCs generally provide significant gains at the cost of the increase in the average resolution by a fraction of a bit. There are specific scenarios where the Ternary-ADC-based system outperforms the 1-bit-ADC based system at the same or lower average resolution. In the particular case of 16 ×16 MIMO configuration where the number of low-resolution antennas is N
_L
= 12 and the number of high-resolution antennas is N
_H
= 4, the Ternary-ADC based system can obtain a power gain of about 2 dB at the frame error rate (FER) or bit error rate (BER) level of 10
^-5
.