Millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems with a large number of antennas are power hungry when using conventional high-resolution analog-to-digital/digital-to-analog converters (A/Ds). To reduce the power consumption of mmWave MIMO systems, existing studies have considered hybrid structures with a reduced number of high-resolution or low-resolution A/Ds at either the transmitter or the receiver side. In this paper, we propose and investigate a multi-user hybrid architecture with low-resolution A/Ds equipped at both the transmitter and the receivers. To mitigate the impact of utilizing low-resolution A/Ds at the transceivers, we propose a novel data transmission scheme, which exploits a weighted phased-array to synthesize the beamforming matrix in the analog domain so as to mitigate inter-user interference. Under the scheme proposed, we derive the achievable rate and the energy efficiency to establish guidelines on the optimal resolution choice of A/Ds for hybrid mmWave systems. For a typical total transmit power at the BS, e.g., 30 dBm, the proposed scheme with 5~6-bit A/Ds can significantly improve the energy efficiency by as much as 100% over that of the conventional hybrid MIMO architecture with high-resolution A/Ds (10-bit A/Ds), without significant degradation in data rate performance.

中文翻译：

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低分辨率 A/D 收发器多用户毫米波通信的节能混合波束成形

当使用传统的高分辨率模数/数模转换器 (A/D) 时，具有大量天线的毫米波 (mmWave) 多输入多输出 (MIMO) 通信系统非常耗电。为了降低毫米波 MIMO 系统的功耗，现有研究已经考虑了在发射器或接收器侧减少高分辨率或低分辨率 A/D 数量的混合结构。在本文中，我们提出并研究了一种多用户混合架构，在发射器和接收器上都配备了低分辨率 A/D。为了减轻在收发器上使用低分辨率 A/D 的影响，我们提出了一种新颖的数据传输方案，它利用加权相控阵在模拟域中合成波束形成矩阵，以减轻用户间干扰。根据提议的方案，我们推导出可实现的速率和能量效率，以建立关于混合毫米波系统 A/D 最佳分辨率选择的指南。对于 BS 的典型总发射功率，例如 30 dBm，所提出的具有 5~6 位 A/D 的方案可以将能量效率比具有高分辨率 A/D（10 位 A/D），而不会显着降低数据速率性能。