Abstract
Quantization is the characterization of analogueto-
digital converters (ADC) in massive MIMO systems. The
design of quantization function or quantization thresholds is
found to relate to quantization step, which is the factor that
adapts with the changing of transmit power and noise variance.
With the objective of utilizing low-resolution ADC is reducing
the cost of massive MIMO, we propose an idea as if it is
necessary to have adaptive-threshold quantization function. It
is found that when maximum-likelihood (ML) is employed as
the detection method, having quantization thresholds fixed for
low-resolution ADCs will not cause significant performance loss.
Moreover, such fixed-threshold quantization function does not
require any information of signal power which can reduce the
hardware cost of ADCs. Simulations have been carried out in
this paper to make comparisons between fixed-threshold and
adaptive-threshold quantization regarding various factors.