An Energy-Efficient MIMO Transceiver Architecture for IoT-Enabled Wireless Communication Networks

Abstract

The high rate of growth of Internet of things (IoT) devices has brought strict limit to power consumption, hardware level, and cost of deployment in wireless transceiver design. Although multiple input multiple-output (MIMO)-based methods are generally known to enhance spectral efficiency and connexion reliability, traditional MIMO transceivers are generally maximised to optimise high-throughput systems and use various parallel radio-frequency (RF) chains and computationally expensive baseband processing, which is inappropriate for energy-limited nodes of the IoT. In this paper, a MIMO transceiver architecture that is efficient in energy consumption is proposed targeting the IoT-enabled wireless communication network. The proposed architecture includes adaptive RF-chain activation, low complexity baseband processing and power-constrained transmission modes to dynamically trade-off communication performance and energy consumption by the degree of changing traffic demands and channel conditions. A fully operating transmitter-receiver transceiver chain is designed, which includes RF front-end, information conversion, and information processing blocks with distinct attention to power-scalable operation at the RF level and digital level as well. System-level simulations of the proposed architecture are done by using realistic power consumption models based on CMOS RF literature. The results of the simulation show that the proposed design not only attains limited energy per bittable and substantially improved over traditional always-on MIMO transceiver designs, but also acceptable throughput performance and significantly low bit error rate (BER) owing to the proposed design. These findings affirm that architecture-level adaptation can offer a viable channel through which MIMO functionalities can be realised in low-energy consume devices in the IoT without high-energy expenses.