  The use of large-scale antenna arrays has the potential to bring substantial
improvements in energy efficiency and/or spectral efficiency to future wireless
systems, due to the greatly improved spatial beamforming resolution. Recent
asymptotic results show that by increasing the number of antennas one can
achieve a large array gain and at the same time naturally decorrelate the user
channels; thus, the available energy can be focused very accurately at the
intended destinations without causing much inter-user interference. Since these
results rely on asymptotics, it is important to investigate whether the
conventional system models are still reasonable in the asymptotic regimes. This
paper analyzes the fundamental limits of large-scale multiple-input
single-output (MISO) communication systems using a generalized system model
that accounts for transceiver hardware impairments. As opposed to the case of
ideal hardware, we show that these practical impairments create finite ceilings
on the estimation accuracy and capacity of large-scale MISO systems.
Surprisingly, the performance is only limited by the hardware at the
single-antenna user terminal, while the impact of impairments at the
large-scale array vanishes asymptotically. Furthermore, we show that an
arbitrarily high energy efficiency can be achieved by reducing the power while
increasing the number of antennas.
