Energy Efficiency in Cell-Free Massive MIMO with Zero-Forcing Precoding Design

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new low-complexity power control method with zero-forcing precoding to enhance energy efficiency in cell-free massive MIMO networks, considering backhaul power and imperfect channel information.

Contribution

It introduces a novel power control technique tailored for energy efficiency in cell-free massive MIMO with zero-forcing precoding, accounting for practical system impairments.

Findings

Improved energy efficiency with the proposed power control method.

Effective handling of backhaul power consumption.

Robust performance despite imperfect channel state information.

Abstract

We consider the downlink of a cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) network where numerous distributed access points (APs) serve a smaller number of users under time division duplex operation. An important issue in deploying cell-free networks is high power consumption, which is proportional to the number of APs. This issue has raised the question as to their suitability for green communications in terms of the total energy efficiency (bits/Joule). To tackle this, we develop a novel low-complexity power control technique with zero-forcing precoding design to maximize the energy efficiency of cell-free massive MIMO taking into account the backhaul power consumption and the imperfect channel state information.