Wireless-Powered Cell-Free Massive MIMO With Superimposed Pilot Transmission

Abstract

In this letter, the uplink (UL) wireless information transmission (WIT) and downlink (DL) wireless power transfer (WPT) in cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) networks are investigated. Specifically, the mobile terminals (MTs) collect the radio-frequency energy emitted from the access points (APs) in the DL WPT phase and then use the harvested energy (HE) to transmit pilot and data symbols in the UL WIT phase. Considering the performance of CF-mMIMO networks with a large number of MTs is severely bottlenecked by pilot contamination, the superimposed pilot transmission (SPT) is advocated to alleviate its impact and improve transmission efficiency. Based on the SPT, closed-form UL achievable spectral efficiency (SE) and DL average HE expressions are derived. Simulation results verify the accuracies of the derived expressions and indicate that the SPT significantly outperforms the regular pilot transmission in terms of both SE and HE.