Downlink Pilots are Essential for Cell-Free Massive MIMO with Multi-Antenna Users

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that in cell-free massive MIMO systems with multi-antenna users, using downlink pilots significantly improves spectral efficiency by enabling effective channel estimation, unlike the no-pilot approach suitable for single-antenna users.

Contribution

The paper introduces a pilot-based downlink estimation scheme for multi-antenna users in cell-free massive MIMO and derives a new spectral efficiency expression utilizing zero-forcing combining.

Findings

Downlink pilots enhance spectral efficiency with multi-antenna users.

Effective channel matrix does not harden in multi-antenna scenarios.

Number of users and antennas impacts spectral efficiency.

Abstract

We consider a cell-free massive MIMO system with multiple antennas on the users and access points. In previous works, the downlink spectral efficiency (SE) has been evaluated using the hardening bound that requires no downlink pilots. This approach works well when having single-antenna users. In this paper, we show that much higher SEs can be achieved if downlink pilots are sent since the effective channel matrix does not harden when having multi-antenna users. We propose a pilot-based downlink estimation scheme and derive a new SE expression that utilizes zero-forcing combining. We show numerically how the number of users and user antennas affects the SE.