Distributed Iterative ML and Message Passing for Grant-Free Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems

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Main Authors: Zhao, Zilu, Forsch, Christian, Cottatellucci, Laura, Slock, Dirk
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhao, Zilu
Forsch, Christian
Cottatellucci, Laura
Slock, Dirk
author_facet Zhao, Zilu
Forsch, Christian
Cottatellucci, Laura
Slock, Dirk
contents Cell-Free (CF) Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MaMIMO) is considered one of the leading candidates for enabling next-generation wireless communication. With the growing interest in the Internet of Things (IoT), the Grant-Free (GF) access scheme has emerged as a promising solution to support massive device connectivity. The integration of GF and CF-MaMIMO introduces significant challenges, particularly in designing distributed algorithms for activity detection and pilot contamination mitigation. In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm that addresses these challenges. Our method first employs a component-wise iterative distributed Maximum Likelihood (ML) approach for activity detection, which considers both the pilot and data portions of the received signal. This is followed by a Pseudo-Prior Hybrid Variational Bayes and Expectation Propagation (PP-VB-EP) algorithm for joint data detection and channel estimation. Compared to conventional VB-EP, the proposed PP-VB-EP demonstrates improved convergence behavior and reduced sensitivity to initialization, especially when data symbols are drawn from a finite alphabet. The pseudo prior used in PP-VB-EP acts as an approximated posterior and serves as a regularization term that prevents the Message Passing (MP) algorithm from diverging. To compute the pseudo prior in a distributed fashion, we further develop a distributed version of the Variable-Level Expectation Propagation (VL-EP) algorithm.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_21363
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Distributed Iterative ML and Message Passing for Grant-Free Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems
Zhao, Zilu
Forsch, Christian
Cottatellucci, Laura
Slock, Dirk
Information Theory
Signal Processing
Applications
Cell-Free (CF) Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MaMIMO) is considered one of the leading candidates for enabling next-generation wireless communication. With the growing interest in the Internet of Things (IoT), the Grant-Free (GF) access scheme has emerged as a promising solution to support massive device connectivity. The integration of GF and CF-MaMIMO introduces significant challenges, particularly in designing distributed algorithms for activity detection and pilot contamination mitigation. In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm that addresses these challenges. Our method first employs a component-wise iterative distributed Maximum Likelihood (ML) approach for activity detection, which considers both the pilot and data portions of the received signal. This is followed by a Pseudo-Prior Hybrid Variational Bayes and Expectation Propagation (PP-VB-EP) algorithm for joint data detection and channel estimation. Compared to conventional VB-EP, the proposed PP-VB-EP demonstrates improved convergence behavior and reduced sensitivity to initialization, especially when data symbols are drawn from a finite alphabet. The pseudo prior used in PP-VB-EP acts as an approximated posterior and serves as a regularization term that prevents the Message Passing (MP) algorithm from diverging. To compute the pseudo prior in a distributed fashion, we further develop a distributed version of the Variable-Level Expectation Propagation (VL-EP) algorithm.
title Distributed Iterative ML and Message Passing for Grant-Free Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems
topic Information Theory
Signal Processing
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21363