Performance optimization of cell-free massive MIMO system with power control approach

Abstract

The cell-free massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) system involves a large number of access points serving a smaller number of mobile users (MUs) over identical time/ frequency resource. By providing large number of service antennas closer to the MUs, the cell-free massive MIMO can offer great spectral efficiency, better macro-diversity and minimal path loss. Despite several advantages, the cell-free massive MIMO suffers from energy overloading caused by uncontrolled backhaul power consumption for large number of distributed access points (APs) and pilot contamination during channel estimation. In this paper, we have taken into consideration a cell-free massive MIMO system with APs equipped with multiple antennas performing time-division-duplex (TDD) operation. Here, all the APs coordinate through a constrained backhaul network for joint transmission of signals to all the users simultaneously by multiplying the received signal with the normalized conjugate of the estimated channel state information (CSI) and send back a rounded off version of the weighted pattern to the central processing unit (CPU). Finally, an effective user defined algorithm is presented involving selection and grouping of various APs based on their individual contributions for a particular MU to improve the overall performance of the system.