On the Channel Capacity of Communications with Low-Resolution ADCs over Fading Channels
Abstract
Future wireless systems are expected to rely on large antenna arrays at the base station (BS) to meet growing demands for data rates. However, the power consumption and hardware complexity of high-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) pose significant challenges to the practical deployment of such arrays. Low-resolution ADCs offer a power- and cost-effective alternative, motivating a deeper understanding of information-theoretic limits with low-resolution quantization. This letter establishes capacity scaling laws for both single-input single-output (SISO) and multi-antenna systems with low-resolution quantization. We show that, unlike the classical capacity growth in unquantized systems, the capacity of low-resolution systems approaches n at a rate for SISO and multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems, where n is the number of quantization bits and is the signal-to-noise ratio. For …