Low-Resolution ADCs for Two-Hop Massive MIMO Relay System under Rician Channels

This paper works on building an effective massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) relay system by increasing the achievable sum rate and energy efficiency. First, we design a two-hop massive MIMO relay system instead of a one-hop system to shorten the distance and create a Line-of-Sight (LOS) path between relays. Second, we apply Rician channels between relays in this system. Third, we apply low-resolution Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) at both relays to quantize signals, and apply Amplify-and-Forward (AF) and Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC) to the processed signal at relay [Formula: see text] and relay [Formula: see text] correspondingly. Fourth, we use higher-order statistics to derive the closed-form expression of the achievable sum rate. Fifth, we derive the power scaling law and achieve the asymptotic expressions under different power scales. Last, we validate the correctness of theoretical analysis with numerical simulation results and show the superiority of the two-hop relay system over the one-hop relay system. From both closed-form expressions and simulation results, we discover that the two-hop system has a higher achievable sum rate than the one-hop system. Besides, the energy efficiency in the two-hop system is higher than the one-hop system. Moreover, in the two-hop system, when quantization bits [Formula: see text] , the achievable sum rate converges. Therefore, deploying low-resolution ADCs can improve the energy efficiency and achieve a fairly considerable achievable sum rate.