Mitigation of UE Antenna Calibration Errors via Differential STBC in Cell-Free Massive MIMO
Information Theory
2026-05-18 v2 math.IT
Abstract
This letter investigates the use of differential space-time block coding (DSTBC) to address antenna array calibration impairments at multi-antenna user equipment (UE) in the downlink (DL) of cell-free massive MIMO (CF-mMIMO) systems. We show that, by exploiting DSTBC, reliable DL communication can be achieved without explicit UE-side calibration or channel phase knowledge. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DSTBC-based transmission effectively mitigates the impact of antenna-dependent phase offsets, restoring near-coherent performance in CF-mMIMO networks.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.08962,
title = {Mitigation of UE Antenna Calibration Errors via Differential STBC in Cell-Free Massive MIMO},
author = {Marx M. M. Freitas and Stefano Buzzi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.08962},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
accepted for publication on IEEE Wireless Communications Letters. Copyright belongs to IEEE. Only personal use is permitted