  In massive MIMO, most precoders result in downlink signals that suffer from
high PAR, independently of modulation order and whether single-carrier or OFDM
transmission is used. The high PAR lowers the power efficiency of the base
station amplifiers. To increase power efficiency, low-PAR precoders have been
proposed. In this article, we compare different transmission schemes for
massive MIMO in terms of the power consumed by the amplifiers. It is found that
(i) OFDM and single-carrier transmission have the same performance over a
hardened massive MIMO channel and (ii) when the higher amplifier power
efficiency of low-PAR precoding is taken into account, conventional and low-PAR
precoders lead to approximately the same power consumption. Since downlink
signals with low PAR allow for simpler and cheaper hardware, than signals with
high PAR, therefore, the results suggest that low-PAR precoding with either
single-carrier or OFDM transmission should be used in a massive MIMO base
station.
