Millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems with a large number of antennas are power hungry when using conventional high-resolution analog-to-digital/digital-to-analog converters (A/Ds). To reduce the power consumption of mmWave MIMO systems, existing studies have considered hybrid structures with a reduced number of high-resolution or low-resolution A/Ds at either the transmitter or the receiver side. In this paper, we propose and investigate a multi-user hybrid architecture with low-resolution A/Ds equipped at both the transmitter and the receivers. To mitigate the impact of utilizing low-resolution A/Ds at the transceivers, we propose a novel data transmission scheme, which exploits a weighted phased-array to synthesize the beamforming matrix in the analog domain so as to mitigate inter-user interference. Under the scheme proposed, we derive the achievable rate and the energy efficiency to establish guidelines on the optimal resolution choice of A/Ds for hybrid mmWave systems. For a typical total transmit power at the BS, e.g., 30 dBm, the proposed scheme with 5~6-bit A/Ds can significantly improve the energy efficiency by as much as 100% over that of the conventional hybrid MIMO architecture with high-resolution A/Ds (10-bit A/Ds), without significant degradation in data rate performance.
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Zhao et al. (2020) studied this question.