Protograph LPDC Coded Large-Scale MIMO Communications With Low-Resolution ADCs

In this paper, we develop a new algorithm of joint detection and decoding receiver for the large-scale multiple-input multiple-out (LS-MIMO) coded communication systems with low-resolution ADCs. The new algorithm enables us to perform extensive experiments to address the performance and complexity tradeoff issue for LS-MIMO communication systems. Our study results indicate that 4-bit ADC is the best choice to achieve an excellent balance between the transmit power and complexity. Furthermore, the experiments reveal that the LS-MIMO system with 4-bit ADC can approach the performance of the high-resolution LS-MIMO system in the entire range of signal to noise ratio. In the other extreme, the LS-MIMO system with 2-bit ADC suffers 2:2 dB performance loss in terms of transmit power at bit error rate (BER) 10(-6) In all test cases, an extra bit to increase the resolution from 4-bit ADC to 5-bit ADC achieves a tiny fraction of power gain in return.