On Performance Loss of DOA Measurement Using Massive MIMO Receiver with Mixed-ADCs

High hardware cost and high power consumption of massive multiple-input and multiple output (MIMO) are still two challenges for the future wireless communications including beyond 5G. Adopting the low-resolution analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is viewed as a promising solution. Additionally, the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is an indispensable technology for beam alignment and tracking in massive MIMO systems. Thus, in this paper, the performance of DOA estimation for massive MIMO receive array with mixed-ADC structure is first investigated, where one part of radio frequency (RF) chains are connected with high-resolution ADCs and the remaining ones are connected with low-resolution ADCs. Moreover, the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for this architecture is derived based on the additive quantization noise model approximation for the effect of low-resolution ADCs. Then, the root-MUSIC method is designed for such a receive structure. Eventually, a performance loss factor and the associated energy efficiency factor is defined for analysis in detail. Simulation results find that a mixed-ADC architecture can strike a good balance among RMSE performance, circuit cost and energy efficiency. More importantly, just 1-4 bits of low-resolution ADCs can achieve a satisfactory performance for DOA measurement.