A Heterogeneous Massive MIMO Technique for Uniform Service in Cellular Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cost-effective heterogeneous massive MIMO architecture that combines centralized and distributed antennas to provide uniform service quality in cellular networks while reducing infrastructure costs.

Contribution

It proposes a novel hybrid massive MIMO system that balances performance and cost by strategically splitting antennas between centralized and distributed nodes.

Findings

Achieves user fairness comparable to cell-free systems.

Reduces infrastructure costs significantly compared to traditional CF systems.

Demonstrates superior performance-cost balance through numerical simulations.

Abstract

Traditional cellular networks struggle with poor quality of service (QoS) for cell-edge users, while cell-free (CF) systems offer uniform QoS but incur high roll-out costs due to acquiring numerous access point (AP) sites and deploying a large-scale optical fiber network to connect them. This paper proposes a cost-effective heterogeneous massive MIMO architecture that integrates centralized co-located antennas at a cell-center base station with distributed edge APs. By strategically splitting massive antennas between centralized and distributed nodes, the system maintains high user fairness comparable to CF systems but reduces infrastructure costs substantially, by minimizing the required number of AP sites and fronthaul connections. Numerical results demonstrate its superiority in balancing performance and costs compared to cellular and CF systems.