Channel capacity comparison of different system concepts for mmWave

For 5G it will be important to leverage the available millimeter wave spectrum. Communication at high carrier frequencies requires antenna arrays at both the base and mobile station. A 1-bit analog to digital converter can effectively reduce the complexity and power consumption of the analog receiver frontend. This is especially interesting in the context of large antenna arrays with a sizable signal bandwidth. The RF receiver frontend power consumption of analog beamforming, full resolution ADC digital beamforming, and 1-bit quantized digital beamforming are compared. This power model consists of components designed for the 60 GHz band. With this power model systems with equal power consumption, and therefore different numbers of antennas, are compared in terms of channel capacity. In the low SNR regime the performance of the system with 1-bit quantization outperforms the ones with full resolution ADC digital beamforming and analog beamforming.