Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems employs an increasing number of antennas, which leads to relevant energy consumption and hardware cost of the corresponding front ends. In this context, the use of lowresolution analog to digital converters (ADCs) is promoted as a promising solution to this problem. In this study we consider a low-resolution MIMO receiver which implies that the received signals simultaneously are processed by the 1-bit ADCs and the comparator network. The input signals for the comparator network can come from different antennas, such that the comparator network extension can be interpreted as virtual channels with binary outputs. Based on such low-resolution MIMO receivers, we develop low-resolution aware linear minimum mean-squared error (LRA-LMMSE) channel estimator and detector according to the Bussgang theorem. Two comparator networks are proposed, namely, fully and partially connected networks. We also devise a greedy search-based partially connected network that can use much less comparators to approach the performance of the fully connected network. Numerical results shows that adding virtual channels can be better than adding extra physical channels which corresponds to additional receive antennas in terms of bit error rate (BER). Furthermore, by employing the proposed channel estimator and its corresponding estimation error, we build up a lower bound on the ergodic sum rate for the LRA-LMMSE receiver. Simulation results show that the systems with the proposed network-aided MIMO systems with 1-bit quantization at the receiver outperforms the conventional 1-bit MIMO system in terms of BER and mean-square error (MSE) performances. Moreover, numerical simulations confirm a significant advantage in terms of sum rate for the proposed system.