Cell-Free Massive MIMO: Uniformly great service for everyone

By Hien Quoc Ngo, Alexei E. Ashikhmin, Hong Yang, Erik G. Larsson, T. Marzetta. International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications, 2015

392 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We consider the downlink of Cell-Free Massive MIMO systems, where a very large number of distributed access points (APs) simultaneously serve a much smaller number of users. Each AP uses local channel estimates obtained from received uplink pilots and applies conjugate beamforming to transmit data to the users. We derive a closed-form expression for the achievable rate. This expression enables us to design an optimal max-min power control scheme that gives equal quality of service to all users. We further compare the performance of the Cell-Free Massive MIMO system to that of a conventional small-cell network and show that the throughput of the Cell-Free system is much more concentrated around its median compared to that of the smallcell system. The Cell-Free Massive MIMO system can provide an almost 20-fold increase in 95%-likely per-user throughput, compared with the small-cell system. Furthermore, Cell-Free systems are more robust to shadow fading correlation than smallcell systems.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bfdba136438a125a08d0f75cf7d30368a24e6bf5

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Citations in the corpus

Learning the MMSE Channel Estimator (2017, background): “A third example with a decomposition as in Assumption 2 is a setup with distributed antennas [18], [19].”
Foundations of User-Centric Cell-Free Massive MIMO (2020, methodology): “The word “massive” refers to an envisioned operating regime with many more APs than UEs [127], and is as an analogy to the conventional Massive MIMO regime in cellular networks; that is, having many more antennas at the infrastructure side than UEs to be served.”
Precoding and Power Optimization in Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems (2017, methodology): “The performance of cellfree systems in [21] is compared to that of small-cell systems using MF receiver.”
Holistic Network Virtualization and Pervasive Network Intelligence for 6G (2023, background): “, space-air-ground integrated networks for global coverage [8], cell-free massive multipleinput multiple-output (MIMO) architecture for inter-cell interference mitigation [223], and multi-tier computing architecture for ubiquitous computing service provisioning [224].”
Cell-Free Massive MIMO: User-Centric Approach (2017, methodology): “Papers [1], [2] show that the CF approach – which is basically an instance of full-AP cooperation – provides better performance than a small-cell system in terms of 95%-likely per-user throughput.”