Spectral Efficiency of Multipair Massive MIMO Two-Way Relaying with Hardware Impairments

Abstract: We consider a multipair massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) two-way relaying system, where multiple pairs of single-antenna devices exchange data with the help of a relay employing a large number of antennas $N$. The relay consists of low-cost components that suffer from hardware impairments. A large-scale approximation of the spectral efficiency (SE) with maximum ratio (MR) processing is derived in closed form, and the approximation is tight as $N \to \infty$. It is revealed that for a fixed hardware quality, the impact of the hardware impairments vanishes asymptotically when $N$ grows large. Moreover, the impact of the impairments may even vanish when the hardware quality is gradually decreased with $N$, if a scaling law is satisfied. Finally, numerical results validate that multipair massive MIMO two-way relaying systems are robust to hardware impairments at the relay.