Cell-Free Massive MIMO with Limited Backhaul

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the performance of cell-free Massive MIMO systems with limited backhaul capacity, proposing optimization and user assignment algorithms to enhance uplink rates under quantization constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a novel max-min optimization framework and iterative solution for cell-free Massive MIMO with quantized signals and limited backhaul.

Findings

Proposed an iterative scheme for max-min uplink rate optimization.

Developed a user assignment algorithm to improve system performance.

Analyzed system performance with different quantization and backhaul constraints.

Abstract

We consider a cell-free Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system and investigate the system performance for the case when the quantized version of the estimated channel and the quantized received signal are available at the central processing unit (CPU), and the case when only the quantized version of the combined signal with maximum ratio combining (MRC) detector is available at the CPU. Next, we study the max-min optimization problem, where the minimum user uplink rate is maximized with backhaul capacity constraints. To deal with the max-min non-convex problem, we propose to decompose the original problem into two sub-problems. Based on these sub-problems, we develop an iterative scheme which solves the original max-min user uplink rate. Moreover, we present a user assignment algorithm to further improve the performance of cell-free Massive MIMO with limited backhaul links.