Scalability Aspects of Cell-Free Massive MIMO
Abstract
Ubiquitous cell-free massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) combines massive MIMO technology and user-centric transmission in a distributed architecture. All the access points (APs) in the network cooperate to jointly and coherently serve a smaller number of users in the same time-frequency resource. However, this coordination needs significant amounts of control signalling which introduces additional overhead, while data co-processing increases the back/front-haul requirements. Hence, the notion that the "whole world" could constitute one network, and that all APs would act as a single base station, is not scalable. In this study, we address some system scalability aspects of cell-free massive MIMO that have been neglected in literature until now. In particular, we propose and evaluate a solution related to data processing, network topology and power control. Results indicate that our proposed framework achieves full scalability at the cost of a modest performance loss compared to the canonical form of cell-free massive MIMO.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1902.11275,
title = {Scalability Aspects of Cell-Free Massive MIMO},
author = {Giovanni Interdonato and Pål Frenger and Erik G. Larsson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.11275},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
Paper published in ICC 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC). {\copyright} 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses