Impact of Transceiver Impairments on the Capacity of Dual-Hop Relay Massive MIMO Systems

Despite the deleterious effect of hardware impairments
on communication systems, most prior works have not
investigated their impact on widely used relay systems. Most
importantly, the application of inexpensive transceivers, being
prone to hardware impairments, is the most cost-efficient way
for the implementation of massive multiple-input multiple-output
(MIMO) systems. Consequently, the direction of this paper is
towards the investigation of the impact of hardware impairments
on MIMO relay networks with large number of antennas. Specifically,
we obtain the general expression for the ergodic capacity
of dual-hop (DH) amplify-and-forward (AF) relay systems. Next,
given the advantages of the free probability (FP) theory with
comparison to other known techniques in the area of large
random matrix theory, we pursue a large limit analysis in terms
of number of antennas and users by shedding light to the behavior
of relay systems inflicted by hardware impairments.