Bayesian Receiver Design via Bilinear Inference for Cell-Free Massive MIMO With Low-Resolution ADCs

Abstract

We propose a novel joint channel and data estimation (JCDE) scheme to combat the rate limitation in fronthaul links of cell-free massive MIMO (CF-mMIMO) systems introduced by the use of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) at access points (APs), which makes channel estimation and multi-user detection at the central AP (CAP) challenging. The latter problem is solved here via the new JCDE scheme which differs from state-of-the-art (SotA) alternatives due to two contributions. The first is the design and incorporation of de-quantization (DQ) step which relies only on scalar Gaussian approximation (SGA) assumptions in conformity with mild central limit theorem (CLT), in contrast to the much harder asymptotic conditions required by the classic bilinear generalized approximate message passing (BiGAMP) algorithm. The second is a modification of bilinear Gaussian belief propagation (BiGaBP), whereby quantized outputs are linearized via the Bussgang decomposition enabling tractable signal processing. The resulting DQ-aided JCDE method achieves both low-complexity and high-accuracy by exploiting both the spatial degrees of freedom (DoF) obtained from, and the observations at the CAP to compensate for the low-resolution distortion introduced by, the distributed APs. The efficacy of the proposed method over the SotA is confirmed via computer simulations.