A Frequency-Domain Opportunistic Approach for Spectral-Efficient Cell-Free Massive MIMO

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jiang, Wei, Schotten, Hans Dieter
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866917935124054016
author Jiang, Wei
Schotten, Hans Dieter
author_facet Jiang, Wei
Schotten, Hans Dieter
contents Constrained by weak signal strength and significant inter-cell interference, users located at the cell edge in a cellular network suffer from inferior service quality. Recently, cell-free massive MIMO (CFmMIMO) has gained considerable attention due to its capability to offer uniform quality of service, alleviating the cell-edge problem. In contrast to previous studies focused on narrow-band CFmMIMO systems, this paper studies wideband CFmMIMO communications against channel frequency selectivity. By exploiting the frequency-domain flexibility offered by orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), and leveraging a particular spatial characteristic in the cell-free structure -- namely, the near-far effect among distributed access points (APs) -- we propose an opportunistic approach to boost spectral efficiency. The core concept lies in opportunistically activating nearby APs for certain users across their assigned OFDM subcarriers while deactivating distant APs to prevent power wastage and lower inter-user interference. Furthermore, this approach enables the use of downlink pilots by reducing the number of active APs per subcarrier to a small subset, thereby substantially improving downlink performance through coherent detection at the user receiver. Verified by numerical results, our proposed approach demonstrates considerable performance improvement compared to the two benchmark approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_17051
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Frequency-Domain Opportunistic Approach for Spectral-Efficient Cell-Free Massive MIMO
Jiang, Wei
Schotten, Hans Dieter
Information Theory
Signal Processing
Constrained by weak signal strength and significant inter-cell interference, users located at the cell edge in a cellular network suffer from inferior service quality. Recently, cell-free massive MIMO (CFmMIMO) has gained considerable attention due to its capability to offer uniform quality of service, alleviating the cell-edge problem. In contrast to previous studies focused on narrow-band CFmMIMO systems, this paper studies wideband CFmMIMO communications against channel frequency selectivity. By exploiting the frequency-domain flexibility offered by orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), and leveraging a particular spatial characteristic in the cell-free structure -- namely, the near-far effect among distributed access points (APs) -- we propose an opportunistic approach to boost spectral efficiency. The core concept lies in opportunistically activating nearby APs for certain users across their assigned OFDM subcarriers while deactivating distant APs to prevent power wastage and lower inter-user interference. Furthermore, this approach enables the use of downlink pilots by reducing the number of active APs per subcarrier to a small subset, thereby substantially improving downlink performance through coherent detection at the user receiver. Verified by numerical results, our proposed approach demonstrates considerable performance improvement compared to the two benchmark approaches.
title A Frequency-Domain Opportunistic Approach for Spectral-Efficient Cell-Free Massive MIMO
topic Information Theory
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17051