Performance Analysis of Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems: A Stochastic Geometry Approach

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) has emerged as an alternative deployment for conventional cellular massive MIMO networks. As revealed by its name, this topology considers no cells, while a large number of multi-antenna access points (APs) serves simultaneously a smaller number of users over the same time/frequency resources through time-division duplex (TDD) operation. Prior works relied on the strong assumption (quite idealized) that the APs are uniformly distributed, and actually, this randomness was considered during the simulation and not in the analysis. However, in practice, ongoing and future networks become denser and increasingly irregular. Having this in mind, we consider that the AP locations are modeled by means of a Poisson point process (PPP) which is a more realistic model for the spatial randomness than a grid or uniform deployment. In particular, by virtue of stochastic geometry tools, we derive both the downlink coverage probability and achievable rate. Notably, this is the only work providing the coverage probability and shedding light on this aspect of CF massive MIMO systems. Focusing on the extraction of interesting insights, we consider small-cells (SCs) as a benchmark for comparison. Among the findings, CF massive MIMO systems achieve both higher coverage and rate with comparison to SCs due to the properties of favorable propagation, channel hardening, and interference suppression. Especially, we showed for both architectures that increasing the AP density results in a higher coverage which saturates after a certain value and increasing the number of users decreases the achievable rate but CF massive MIMO systems take advantage of the aforementioned properties, and thus, outperform SCs. In general, the performance gap between CF massive MIMO systems and SCs is enhanced by increasing the AP density. Another interesting observation concerns that a higher path-loss exponent decreases the rate while the users closer to the APs affect more the performance in terms of the rate.Peer reviewe

Scaling up MIMO: Opportunities and Challenges with Very Large Arrays

This paper surveys recent advances in the area of very large MIMO systems. With very large MIMO, we think of systems that use antenna arrays with an order of magnitude more elements than in systems being built today, say a hundred antennas or more. Very large MIMO entails an unprecedented number of antennas simultaneously serving a much smaller number of terminals. The disparity in number emerges as a desirable operating condition and a practical one as well. The number of terminals that can be simultaneously served is limited, not by the number of antennas, but rather by our inability to acquire channel-state information for an unlimited number of terminals. Larger numbers of terminals can always be accommodated by combining very large MIMO technology with conventional time- and frequency-division multiplexing via OFDM. Very large MIMO arrays is a new research field both in communication theory, propagation, and electronics and represents a paradigm shift in the way of thinking both with regards to theory, systems and implementation. The ultimate vision of very large MIMO systems is that the antenna array would consist of small active antenna units, plugged into an (optical) fieldbus.Comment: Accepted for publication in the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, October 201

Massive MIMO is a Reality -- What is Next? Five Promising Research Directions for Antenna Arrays

Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is no longer a "wild" or "promising" concept for future cellular networks - in 2018 it became a reality. Base stations (BSs) with 64 fully digital transceiver chains were commercially deployed in several countries, the key ingredients of Massive MIMO have made it into the 5G standard, the signal processing methods required to achieve unprecedented spectral efficiency have been developed, and the limitation due to pilot contamination has been resolved. Even the development of fully digital Massive MIMO arrays for mmWave frequencies - once viewed prohibitively complicated and costly - is well underway. In a few years, Massive MIMO with fully digital transceivers will be a mainstream feature at both sub-6 GHz and mmWave frequencies. In this paper, we explain how the first chapter of the Massive MIMO research saga has come to an end, while the story has just begun. The coming wide-scale deployment of BSs with massive antenna arrays opens the door to a brand new world where spatial processing capabilities are omnipresent. In addition to mobile broadband services, the antennas can be used for other communication applications, such as low-power machine-type or ultra-reliable communications, as well as non-communication applications such as radar, sensing and positioning. We outline five new Massive MIMO related research directions: Extremely large aperture arrays, Holographic Massive MIMO, Six-dimensional positioning, Large-scale MIMO radar, and Intelligent Massive MIMO.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Digital Signal Processin