On the MIMO capacity with residual transceiver hardware impairments

Abstract

Abstract-Radio-frequency (RF) impairments in the transceiver hardware of communication systems (e.g., phase noise (PN), high power amplifier (HPA) nonlinearities, or inphase/quadrature-phase (I/Q) imbalance) can severely degrade the performance of traditional multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Although calibration algorithms can partially compensate these impairments, the remaining distortion still has substantial impact. Despite this, most prior works have not analyzed this type of distortion. In this paper, we investigate the impact of residual transceiver hardware impairments on the MIMO system performance. In particular, we consider a transceiver impairment model, which has been experimentally validated, and derive analytical ergodic capacity expressions for both exact and high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). We demonstrate that the capacity saturates in the high-SNR regime, thereby creating a finite capacity ceiling. We also present a linear approximation for the ergodic capacity in the low-SNR regime, and show that impairments have only a second-order impact on the capacity. Furthermore, we analyze the effect of transceiver impairments on large-scale MIMO systems; interestingly, we prove that if one increases the number of antennas at one side only, the capacity behaves similar to the finite-dimensional case. On the contrary, if the number of antennas on both sides increases with a fixed ratio, the capacity ceiling vanishes; thus, impairments cause only a bounded offset in the capacity compared to the ideal transceiver hardware case.

Asymptotic analysis of asymmetric MIMO links: EVM limits for joint decoding of PSK and QAM

“…Motivated by the EVM, we adopt the 'binoisy' channel model of [3]- [12], which includes also a transmit-side noise term; this is a convenient compromise between facilitating theoretical analysis and resorting to measurements or simulations. In a strict sense, additive noise is still only a simplified representation of complex nonlinear phenomena occurring due to hardware impairments, especially when considering their joint coupled effects or residual distortion after compensation.…”

“…The key reference results for the present study are reported in [3]- [12]. These seminal works formulated the research niche around the binoisy channel model and established the baseline understanding of MIMO communication under EVM with numerical simulations and theoretical analysis.…”

“…SYSTEM MODEL Consider the system depicted in Fig. 1 and modeled as a binoisy channel [3]- [12]. The received signal is given by…”

Performance Limits of MIMO Systems with Nonlinear Power Amplifiers

“…However, (21) and (24) are inherently complicated formulas. Motivated by this, we confine the results between an upper and two lower bounds such that R lower ≤ R ≤ R upper .…”

Impact of Residual Additive Transceiver Hardware Impairments on Rayleigh-Product MIMO Channels With Linear Receivers: Exact and Asymptotic Analyses

“…An example is the phase noise, which accumulates within the channel coherence period [18], [26], [27]. On the other hand, the aggregate effect from many impairments can be described by an additive system model [15], [16], [23]- [28],…”