Coexistence of eMBB+ and mMTC+ in Uplink Cell-Free Massive MIMO Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a time-frequency spreading scheme for uplink coexistence of eMBB+ and mMTC+ in cell-free massive MIMO, deriving rate bounds and demonstrating efficient multiplexing with minimal performance trade-offs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel spreading-based access scheme for simultaneous eMBB+ and mMTC+ support in cell-free massive MIMO with imperfect channel knowledge.

Findings

Effective multiplexing of eMBB+ and mMTC+ traffic achieved

Performance of mMTC+ devices remains robust with eMBB+ presence

Trade-offs identified in spreading gain and access point selection

Abstract

This paper tackles the problem of designing proper uplink multiple access schemes for coexistence between enhanced mobile broadband+ (eMBB+) users and massive machine-type communications+ (mMTC+) devices in a terminal-centric cell-free massive MIMO system. Specifically, the use of a time-frequency spreading technique for the mMTC+ devices has been proposed. Coupled with the assumption of imperfect channel knowledge, closed-form bounds of the achievable (ergodic) rate for the two data services are derived. Using suitable power control mechanisms, we show it is possible to efficiently multiplex eMBB+ and mMTC+ traffic in the same time-frequency resource grid. Numerical experiments reveal interesting trade-offs in the selection of the spreading gain and the number of serving access points within the system. Results also demonstrate that the performance of the mMTC+ devices is slightly affected by the presence of the eMBB+ users. Overall, our approach can endow good quality of service to both 6G cornerstones at once.