Realizing Multi-User Massive MIMO Receiver Using Single Radio Frequency Chain Per User

We propose a new receiver architecture for multi-user massive MIMO system that uses one radio frequency (RF) chain per user. We show that the proposed receiver architecture can provide virtually the same performance as the conventional receiver architecture which requires one RF chain per antenna. The basic idea is to perform the necessary signal processing in the RF domain and then down convert the processed information to the baseband to detect the intended user data. Since the number of antennas in multi-user massive MIMO receiver is much larger than the number of users, the proposed architecture can significantly reduce the hardware complexity, size, and power consumption over the conventional architecture.