Limited Feedback in Single and Multi-user MIMO Systems with Finite-Bit ADCs

Abstract: Communication systems with low-resolution analog-to-digital-converters (ADCs) can exploit channel state information at the transmitter and receiver. This paper presents codebook designs and performance analyses for limited feedback MIMO systems with finite-bit ADCs. A point-to-point single-user channel is firstly considered. When the received signal is sliced by 1-bit ADCs, the absolute phase at the receiver is important to align the phase of the received signals. A new codebook design for beamforming, which separately quantizes the channel direction and the residual phase, is therefore proposed. For the multi-bit case where the optimal transmission method is unknown, suboptimal Gaussian signaling and eigenvector beamforming is assumed to obtain a lower bound of the achievable rate. It is found that to limit the rate loss, more feedback bits are needed in the medium SNR regime than the low and high SNR regimes, which is quite different from the conventional infinite-bit ADC case. Second, a multi-user system where a multiple-antenna transmitter sends signals to multiple single-antenna receivers with finite-bit ADCs is considered. Based on the derived performance loss due to finite-bit ADCs and finite-bit CSI feedback, the number of bits per feedback should increase linearly with the ADC resolution in order to restrict the rate loss.