In future high-capacity wireless systems based on mmWave or massive multipleinput multiple output (MIMO), the power consumption of receiver Analog toDigital Converters (ADC) is a concern. Although hybrid or analog systems withfewer ADCs have been proposed, fully digital receivers with many lowerresolution ADCs (and lower power) may be a more versatile solution. In thispaper, focusing on an uplink scenario, we propose to take the optimization ofADC resolution one step further by enabling variable resolutions in the ADCsthat sample the signal received at each antenna. This allows to give more bitsto the antennas that capture the strongest incoming signal and fewer bits tothe antennas that capture little signal energy and mostly noise. Simulationresults show that, depending on the unquantized link SNR, a power saving in theorder of 20-80% can be obtained by our variable resolution proposal incomparison with a reference fully digital receiver with a fixed low number ofbits in all its ADCs.
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