Abstract:

This paper considers angular-domain channel estimation for massive MIMO systems with one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) equipped at base stations for the sake of lower power consumption and reduced hardware cost. We characterize analytical performance, in terms of the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB), on estimating the two-dimensional channel matrix (including angle-of-departure, angleof-arrival and associated channel path gains) in the angular-domain representation. Our analysis provides a simple tool to compare the channel estimation performance among several one-bit quantization schemes. Particularly, we study the performance trade-off between fixed (zero-threshold) and time-varying one-bit quantization schemes. Numerical results are provided for analytical performance verification as a function of SNR and the number of pilots.