Limited-Fronthaul Cell-Free Massive MIMO With Local MMSE Receiver Under Rician Fading and Phase Shifts

Abstract

A cell-free Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system is considered, where the access points (APs) are linked to a central processing unit (CPU) via the limited-capacity fronthaul links. It is assumed that only the quantized version of the weighted signals are available at the CPU. The achievable rate of a limited fronthaul cell-free massive MIMO with local minimum mean square error (MMSE) detection is studied. We study the assumption of uncorrelated quantization distortion, which is commonly used in literature. We show that this assumption will not affect the validity of the insights obtained in our work. To investigate this, we compare the uplink per-user rate with different system parameters for two different scenarios; 1) the exact uplink per-user rate and 2) the uplink per-user rate while ignoring the correlation between the inputs of the quantizers. Finally, we present the conditions which imply that the quantization distortions across APs can be assumed to be uncorrelated.