Impact of Hardware Impairments on the Performance of Millimeter-Wave Massive MU-MIMO Systems with Distributed Antennas

The impact of hardware impairments play an crucial role in any practical communication systems, yet they are generally omitted when investigating the performance of distributed massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems. In particularly, for millimeter-Wave (mm-Wave) bands, no study has been addressed yet. To overcome this limitation, in this paper a mm-Wave distributed massive multi-user (MU) MIMO system based-hybrid beamforming structure, in which the residual hardware impairments have been incorporated in the transmitter processing, is presented. At each base station (BS), a zero-forcing (ZF) baseband processing is designed over the effective channel to efficiently remove the multi-user (MU) interference. The results show that, relative to the co-located mm-Wave massive MIMO with the same antenna configurations, mm-Wave distributed MIMO achieves a significantly higher performance while reducing the impingement of hardware practical defects.