Zero-Crossing Precoding Techniques for Channels With 1-Bit Temporal Oversampling ADCs

A promising approach to reducing the energy consumption is to consider coarse quantization at the receiver. In this study, we investigate novel precoding techniques in space and time for bandlimited multiuser MIMO downlink channels with 1-bit quantization and oversampling at the receiver, considering zero-crossing modulation. The proposed time-instance zero-crossing modulation conveys the information into the time-instances of zero-crossings. Two design criteria for time-instance zero-crossing modulation are investigated, namely, the minimum distance to the decision threshold and the mean-square error between the received and the desired signal. The maximization of the minimum distance to the decision threshold can be formulated as a quadratically constraint quadratic program. As an alternative, an equivalent problem can be formulated based on power minimization, which reduces computational complexity. Departing from the conventional mean-square error based technique, a more sophisticated algorithm is developed, which implies active constellation extension in order to improve the performance at high SNR. The extended problem is solved with two approaches, namely by formulating the problem as a second-order cone program and by considering an alternating optimization algorithm. Numerical results show that the proposed time-instance zero-crossing precoding methods significantly improve the bit error rate compared to the state-of-the-art methods.