Large-Scale Antenna Systems With UL/DL Hardware Mismatch: Achievable Rates Analysis and Calibration

This paper studies the impact of hardware mismatch (HM) between the base station (BS) and the user equipment (UE) in the downlink (DL) of large-scale antenna systems. Analytical expressions to predict the achievable rates are derived for different precoding methods, i.e., matched filter (MF) and regularized zero-forcing (RZF), using large system analysis techniques. Furthermore, the upper bounds on achievable rates of MF and RZF with HM are investigated, which are related to the statistics of the circuit gains of the mismatched hardware. Moreover, we present a study of HM calibration, where we take zero-forcing (ZF) precoding as an example to compare two HM calibration schemes, i.e., Pre-precoding Calibration (Pre-Cal) and Post-precoding Calibration (Post-Cal). The analysis shows that Pre-Cal outperforms Post-Cal schemes. Monte-Carlo simulations are carried out, and numerical results demonstrate the correctness of the analysis.