Distributed Massive MIMO with 1-Bit Radio-over-Fiber Fronthaul: Uplink Spectral Efficiency and Power Control

We analyze the uplink spectral efficiency achievable in a distributed multiple-input multiple-output (D-MIMO) architecture employing a 1-bit radio-over-fiber fronthaul. This architecture eliminates the need for local oscillators at the access points, hence enabling coherent-phase transmission without costly over-the-air synchronization. With this fronthaul architecture, the uplink signal at the central processing unit is a dithered, oversampled, and 1-bit quantized version of the passband signal received at the access points. This makes some of the conventional spectral-efficiency expressions used in the D-MIMO literature not directly applicable for two key reasons: the nonlinearity of the input-output relation and the practical unavailability of minimum mean square error (MMSE) channel estimates. To address this issue, we propose novel achievable-rate expressions that do not require MMSE channel estimates and rely on the Bussgang decomposition to linearize the input-output relation. We use these expressions to determine the optimal signal-to-dither ratio (SDR) that maximizes the achievable rates in both single- and multiuser scenarios and to assess the impact of oversampling. We then use one of the proposed achievable-rate expressions to investigate the max-min fairness problem when the access points cannot maintain the optimal SDR because of limitations in their dynamic range.

EVM Analysis of Distributed Massive MIMO with 1-Bit Radio-Over-Fiber Fronthaul

We analyze the uplink performance of a distributed massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) architecture in which the remotely located access points (APs) are connected to a central processing unit via a fiber-optical fronthaul carrying a dithered and 1-bit quantized version of the received radio-frequency (RF) signal. The innovative feature of the proposed architecture is that no down-conversion is performed at the APs. This eliminates the need to equip the APs with local oscillators, which may be difficult to synchronize. Under the assumption that a constraint is imposed on the amount of data that can be exchanged across the fiber-optical fronthaul, we investigate the tradeoff between spatial oversampling, defined in terms of the total number of APs, and temporal oversampling, defined in terms of the oversampling factor selected at the central processing unit, to facilitate the recovery of the transmitted signal from 1-bit samples of the RF received signal. Using the so-called error-vector magnitude (EVM) as performance metric, we shed light on the optimal design of the dither signal, and quantify, for a given number of APs, the minimum fronthaul rate required for our proposed distributed massive MIMO architecture to outperform a standard co-located massive MIMO architecture in terms of EVM.