On the Limits of Communication with Low-Precision Analog-to-Digital Conversion at the Receiver

As communication systems scale up in speed and bandwidth, the cost and power consumption of high-precision (e.g., 8-12 bits) analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) becomes the limiting factor in modern transceiver architectures based on digital signal processing. In this work, we explore the impact of lowering the precision of the ADC on the performance of the communication link. Specifically, we evaluate the communication limits imposed by low-precision ADC (e.g., 1-3 bits) for transmission over the real discrete-time Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel, under an average power constraint on the input. For an ADC with K quantization bins (i.e., a precision of log(2) K bits), we show that the input distribution need not have any more than K + 1 mass points to achieve the channel capacity. For 2-bin (1-bit) symmetric quantization, this result is tightened to show that binary antipodal signaling is optimum for any signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). For multi-bit quantization, a dual formulation of the channel capacity problem is used to obtain tight upper bounds on the capacity. The cutting-plane algorithm is employed to compute the capacity numerically, and the results obtained are used to make the following encouraging observations : (a) up to a moderately high SNR of 20 dB, 2-3 bit quantization results in only 10-20% reduction of spectral efficiency compared to unquantized observations, (b) standard equiprobable pulse amplitude modulated input with quantizer thresholds set to implement maximum likelihood hard decisions is asymptotically optimum at high SNR, and works well at low to moderate SNRs as well.