An increase in the number of transmit antennas (M) poses an equivalent rise in the number of Radio Frequency (RF) chains associated with each antenna element, particularly in digital beamforming. The chain exhibits a substantial amount of power consumption accordingly. Hence, to alleviate such problems, one of the potential solutions is to reduce the number of RFs or to minimize their power consumption. In this paper, low-resolution Digital to Analogue Conversion (DAC) and transmit antenna selection at the downlink are evaluated to favour reducing the total power consumption and achieving energy efficiency in mMIMO with reasonable complexity. Antenna selection and low-resolution DAC techniques are proposed to leverage massive MIMO systems in free space and Close In (CI) path-loss models. The simulation results show that the power consumption decreases with antenna selection and low-resolution DAC. Then, the system achieves more energy efficiency than without low-resolution of DAC and full array utilization.
Keywords: Digital to Analogue Conversion; antenna selection; beamforming; energy efficiency; massive MIMO; mmWave.