User-Centric 5G Cellular Networks: Resource Allocation and Comparison With the Cell-Free Massive MIMO Approach

By Stefano Buzzi, Carmen D'Andrea, Alessio Zappone, Ciro D'Elia. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2018

328 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently, the so-called cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) architecture has been introduced, wherein a very large number of distributed access points (APs) simultaneously and jointly serve a much smaller number of mobile stations (MSs). The paper extends the CF approach to the case in which both the APs and the MSs are equipped with multiple antennas, proposing a beamfoming scheme that, relying on the zero-forcing strategy, does not require channel estimation at the MSs. We contrast the originally proposed formulation of CF massive MIMO with a user-centric (UC) approach wherein each MS is served only by a limited number of APs. Exploiting the framework of successive lower-bound maximization, the paper also proposes and analyzes power allocation strategies aimed at either sum-rate maximization or minimum-rate maximization, both for the uplink and downlink. Results show that the UC approach, which requires smaller backhaul overhead and is more scalable that the CF deployment, also achieves generally better performance than the CF approach for the vast majority of the users, especially on the uplink.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f84b232329488cd393d690072f9840975c1f6b78

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Citations in the corpus

White Paper on Broadband Connectivity in 6G (2020, methodology): “…well-known concepts of CoMP and network MIMO, which are normally implemented in a network-centric fashion where edges between co-operation regions still exist, cell-free massive MIMO can be realized by adopting a user-centric approach [40, 43, 44], whereby each UE is served only by the nearby APs.”
User-Centric Cell-Free Massive MIMO Networks: A Survey of Opportunities, Challenges and Solutions (2021, methodology): “…“DU” and “CU” is motivated by the New Radio interface standard for 5G mobile networks, which deﬁnes a distributed architecture for the next-generation NodeB (gNB) formed from a central unit (gNB-CU or simply CU) connected to distributed units (gNB-DUs or simply DUs) through the F1 interface [40].”