Quantized Polar Transmitters for Power Efficient Massive MIMO Systems

This letter investigates the feasibility of the quantized digital polar transmitter architecture in a downlink multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) system, where a low amplitude resolution and a moderate phase resolution are utilized. We derive a lower bound on the average sum-rate achievable with Gaussian signaling inputs and linear precoding by a simple diagonal approximation for the quantization distortion. The analysis and simulations demonstrate that the quantized polar transmitter can enable excellent performance in terms of average sum-rate throughput, symbol error rate (SER), and out-of-band (OOB) emission level, thus providing an attractive option for the traditional Cartesian architecture.