Are the Data Rates Predicted by the Analytic Analysis of Receivers with Low Resolution ADCs Achievable?

Leveraging the available millimeter wave spectrum will be important for 5G. In this work, we compare an information theory based analytic result for the achievable rate of digital beamforming systems using low resolution Analog-to-Digital-Converters (ADCs), to a link-level simulation of the same system. For both evaluation methods we include imperfect channel knowledge at the receiver and the effects of the ADC in a wideband multi-user uplink scenario. For the system we choose a configuration defined by 3GPP New Radio (5G). Our results show a performance gap between the two systems, which is comparable to other evaluations of this kind for systems like LTE (4G). In the low-to-medium SNR regime from -20 to 0 dB there is a constant difference of about 4 dB between the two evaluation methods. However, due to a number of effects not modeled in the achievable rate analysis the maximum spectral efficiency saturates at a significantly lower value.