The DOI matches its Crossref record; 3 of the 3 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Making Cell-Free Massive MIMO Competitive With MMSE Processing and Centralized Implementation
Open accessAbstract
Cell-free Massive MIMO is considered as a promising technology for satisfying the increasing number of users and high rate expectations in beyond-5G networks. The key idea is to let many distributed access points (APs) communicate with all users in the network, possibly by using joint coherent signal processing. The aim of this paper is to provide the first comprehensive analysis of this technology under different degrees of cooperation among the APs. Particularly, the uplink spectral efficiencies of four different cell-free implementations are analyzed, with spatially correlated fading and arbitrary linear processing. It turns out that it is possible to outperform conventional Cellular Massive MIMO and small cell networks by a wide margin, but only using global or local minimum mean-square error (MMSE) combining. This is in sharp contrast to the existing literature, which advocates for maximum-ratio combining. Also, we show that a centralized implementation with optimal MMSE processing not only maximizes the SE but largely reduces the fronthaul signaling compared to the standard distributed approach. This makes it the preferred way to operate Cell-free Massive MIMO networks. Non-linear decoding is also investigated and shown to bring negligible improvements.
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Cites
Handbook of Mathematical Functions
McQuarrie, D. A. (1966) · American Journal of Physics · doi:10.1119/1.1972842 · Cited by 40,433
Fundamentals of Wireless Communication
Tse, D., & Viswanath, P. (2005) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511807213 · Cited by 13,162
Ubiquitous cell-free massive MIMO communications
Interdonato, G., Björnson, E., Quoc Ngo, H., Frenger, P., & Larsson, E. G. (2019) · EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking · doi:10.1186/s13638-019-1507-0 · Cited by 646
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Cited by
Prospective Multiple Antenna Technologies for Beyond 5G
Zhang, J., Bjornson, E., Matthaiou, M., Ng, D. W. K., Yang, H., & Love, D. J. (2020) · IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications · doi:10.1109/jsac.2020.3000826 · Cited by 877
RIS-Aided Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems for 6G: Fundamentals, System Design, and Applications
Shi, E., Zhang, J., Du, H., Ai, B., Yuen, C., Niyato, D., Letaief, K. B., & Shen, X. (2024) · Proceedings of the IEEE · doi:10.1109/jproc.2024.3404491 · Cited by 224
Algorithm-Unrolling-Based Distributed Optimization for RIS-Assisted Cell-Free Networks
Xu, W., An, J., Li, H., Gan, L., & Yuen, C. (2024) · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · doi:10.1109/jiot.2023.3288072 · Cited by 49
Uplink Performance and Beamforming Design of SIM-enhanced Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems
Shi, E., Zhang, J., Zhu, Y., Liu, Z., An, J., Yuen, C., & Ai, B. (2024) · 2024 IEEE VTS Asia Pacific Wireless Communications Symposium (APWCS) · doi:10.1109/apwcs61586.2024.10679324 · Cited by 4
Deep Learning-based Uplink Data Detection in User-Centric Cell-Free mMIMO Systems
Hematidoust, N., Tadaion, A., Buzzi, S., Magarini, M., & Sadeghi, M. T. (2025) · Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering · doi:10.1007/s40998-025-00811-8 · Cited by 2
Metadata
- Authors
- Bjornson, E., & Sanguinetti, L.
- Venue
- IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
- Published
- 2020-01
- Volume
- 19
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 77-90
- ISSN
- 1536-1276
- 1558-2248
- OpenAlex
- W2974046131
- Cited by
- 974
- References
- 3
- FWCI
- 42.79
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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