Reliable uncoded communication in the quantized SIMO MAC

A single-input multiple-output (SIMO) multiple access channel with a large number of uncoded non-cooperating single antenna transmitters and joint processing at a finite precision multi-antenna receiver is considered. We fix the number of receiver antennas per transmitter and investigate the effects of receiver quantization on the recovery of the transmitted signals in the asymptotic limit of a large number of transmitters. Our results suggest that a very fine quantization resolution at the receiver antennas is not necessary; even a modest increase in the number of bits of quantization (with the number of transmitting users) is sufficient to guarantee asymptotic reliability.