We propose finite-alphabet equalization, a new paradigm that restricts the entries of the spatial equalization matrix to low-resolution numbers, enabling high-throughput, low-power, and low-cost hardware equalizers. To minimize the performance loss of this paradigm, we introduce FAME, short for finite-alphabet minimum mean-square error (MMSE) equalization, which is able to significantly outperform a naive quantization of the linear MMSE matrix. We develop efficient algorithms to approximately solve the NP-hard FAME problem and showcase that near-optimal performance can be achieved with equalization coefficients quantized to only 1-3 bits for massive multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems. We provide very-large scale integration (VLSI) results that demonstrate a reduction in equalization power and area by at least a factor of 3.9x and 5.8x, respectively.
@article{arxiv.2009.02747,
title = {Finite-Alphabet MMSE Equalization for All-Digital Massive MU-MIMO mmWave Communication},
author = {Oscar Castañeda and Sven Jacobsson and Giuseppe Durisi and Tom Goldstein and Christoph Studer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.02747},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Appeared in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications