Requirements of power amplifier on super high bit rate massive MIMO OFDM transmission using higher frequency bands

To actualize the 5th generation (5G) radio access network with a super high bit rate and high capacity, small cells using both higher frequency bands and Massive MIMO technology are needed. Massive MIMO OFDM transmissions in the 20-GHz band at 20 Gbps that take advantage of higher beamforming (BF) gain have been studied. However, Massive MIMO OFDM causes a high peak to average power ratio (PAPR) because of the large number of subcarriers and multiplexed streams, and thus nonlinear distortion of the power amplifier (PA) degrades the transmission performance. On the other hand, Massive MIMO SC-FDMA may reduce the PAPR by sacrificing the BF gain with subband-precoding matrices. In order to achieve a low-cost Massive MIMO transceiver integrated circuit including a PA in the 20-GHz band, this paper compares the performance of Massive MIMO OFDM and SC-FDMA based on link level simulations with 256 transmitter antennas in the presence of PA nonlinear distortion in order to achieve a low-cost Massive MIMO transceiver integrated circuit including a power amplifier (PA) in the 20-GHz band. Simulation results show that the throughput for Massive MIMO OFDM is higher than that for Massive MIMO SC-FDMA. This paper also presents PA requirements for 20-Gbps Massive MEVIO OFDM in terms of throughput and out-of-band radiation.