Analysis of Rayleigh-fading channels with 1-bit quantized output

We consider multi-input multi-output (MIMO) Rayleigh-fading channels with coarsely quantized outputs, where the channel is unknown to the transmitter and receiver. This analysis is of interest in the context of sensor network communication with low cost devices. The key point is that the analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) for such applications should be low-resolution, in order to reduce their cost and power consumption. In this paper, we consider the extreme case of only 1-bit ADC for each receive signal component. We elaborate on some properties of the mutual information compared to the unquantized case. For the SISO case, we show that on-off QPSK signaling is the capacity achieving distribution. To our knowledge, the block-wise Rayleigh-fading channel with mono-bit detection was not studied in the literature.