Software & Data Downloads — 1bCRB

One-Bit CRB for estimating angular-domain channel parameters for massive MIMO.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems can significantly increase the spectral efficiency, mitigate propagation loss by exploiting large array gain, and reduce inter-user interference with high-resolution spatial beamforming. To reduce complexity and power consumption, several transceiver architectures have been proposed for mmWave massive MIMO systems: 1) an analog architecture, 2) a hybrid analog/digital architecture, and 3) a fully digital architecture with low-resolution ADCs.

To this end, we derive the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) on estimating angular-domain channel parameters including angles-of-departure (AoDs), angles-of-arrival (AoAs), and associated channel path gains. Our analysis provides a simple tool to compare channel estimation performance among different one-bit quantization schemes. We also introduce a time-varying threshold scheme to one-bit ADCs to remove an ambiguity between the channel path gain and noise variance for the popular fixed zero-threshold scheme.