  We study the spectral efficiency (SE) of a mixed-ADC massive MIMO system in
which K single-antenna users communicate with a base station (BS) equipped with
M antennas connected to N high-resolution ADCs and M-N one-bit ADCs. This
architecture has been proposed as an approach for realizing massive MIMO
systems with reasonable power consumption. First, we investigate the
effectiveness of mixed-ADC architectures in overcoming the channel estimation
error caused by coarse quantization. For the channel estimation phase, we study
to what extent one can combat the SE loss by exploiting just N << M pairs of
high-resolution ADCs. We extend the round-robin training scheme for mixed-ADC
systems to include both high-resolution and one-bit quantized observations.
Then, we analyze the impact of the resulting channel estimation error in the
data detection phase. We consider random high-resolution ADC assignment and
also analyze a simple antenna selection scheme to increase the SE. Analytical
expressions are derived for the SE for maximum ratio combining (MRC) and
numerical results are presented for zero-forcing (ZF) detection. Performance
comparisons are made against systems with uniform ADC resolution and against
mixed-ADC systems without round-robin training to illustrate under what
conditions each approach provides the greatest benefit.
