Joint Transceiver Beamforming and IRS Phase Shift Design for mmWave MIMO with Modulo ADCs

Abstract

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has accelerated the efficiency of modern wireless systems, yet its performance is constrained by the propagation blocking effect and the receiver analog-to-digital converters (ADC) saturation. Motivated by these, this paper first attempted to study an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided downlink mmWave MIMO system equipped with a modulo ADC front end at the receiver and explicitly models receiver-side quantization error. We propose spectral efficiency (SE) maximization under total-power and constant-modulus constraints and develop a real-valued genetic algorithm-based scheme that, in each generation, (i) explores the IRS reflection matrix and (ii) updates the transceiver beamformers by performing singular value decomposition on the cascaded channel, updated with the IRS reflection matrix. Experimental results demonstrate that the modulo ADC achieves higher SE and lower bit error rates with fewer bit resolution, effectively mitigating saturation-induced clipping and outperforming conventional ADCs.