Cell-Free Massive MIMO-OFDM With Low-Resolution ADCs

Abstract

Cell-free massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is a promising infrastructure for 6G and beyond, offering significantly higher spectral efficiency than traditional cellular systems. In cell-free massive MIMO, a large number of low-cost access points (APs) are densely deployed, making hardware impairments inevitable due to cost-effective radio hardware. While the impact of quantization and other impairments has been extensively studied for narrowband channels, their effects in wideband scenarios remain relatively unexamined. This paper presents the first analysis of how low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) affect the uplink performance of a cell-free massive MIMO system using an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) waveform. Both quantization-impaired channel estimation and data detection are considered, and the quantization-unaware and quantization-aware linear receivers are developed. To further mitigate the adverse effects of quantization at the bit level, an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based receiver is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate that the ADMM-based receiver outperforms conventional linear receivers by orders of magnitude. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.