A Decentralized Pilot Assignment Algorithm for Scalable O-RAN Cell-Free Massive MIMO

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decentralized pilot assignment algorithm for scalable O-RAN cell-free massive MIMO systems, utilizing multi-agent deep reinforcement learning to improve pilot contamination management without prior channel knowledge.

Contribution

It proposes a novel low-complexity, decentralized PA scheme using MA-DRL and a codebook search method tailored for O-RAN CFmMIMO architectures, enhancing scalability and performance.

Findings

Significant reduction in pilot contamination.

Enhanced channel estimation accuracy.

Improved computational scalability over existing methods.

Abstract

Radio access networks (RANs) in monolithic architectures have limited adaptability to supporting different network scenarios. Recently, open-RAN (O-RAN) techniques have begun adding enormous flexibility to RAN implementations. O-RAN is a natural architectural fit for cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CFmMIMO) systems, where many geographically-distributed access points (APs) are employed to achieve ubiquitous coverage and enhanced user performance. In this paper, we address the decentralized pilot assignment (PA) problem for scalable O-RAN-based CFmMIMO systems. We propose a low-complexity PA scheme using a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MA-DRL) framework in which multiple learning agents perform distributed learning over the O-RAN communication architecture to suppress pilot contamination. Our approach does not require prior channel knowledge but instead relies on real-time interactions made with the environment during the learning procedure. In addition, we design a codebook search (CS) scheme that exploits the decentralization of our O-RAN CFmMIMO architecture, where different codebook sets can be utilized to further improve PA performance without any significant additional complexities. Numerical evaluations verify that our proposed scheme provides substantial computational scalability advantages and improvements in channel estimation performance compared to the state-of-the-art.