Cell-Free Massive MIMO with Multi-Antenna Users over Weichselberger Rician Channels

We consider a cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with multi-antenna access points and user equipments (UEs) over Weichselberger Rician fading channels with random phase-shifts. More specifically, we investigate the uplink spectral efficiency (SE) for two pragmatic processing schemes: 1) the fully centralized processing scheme with global minimum mean square error (MMSE) or maximum ratio (MR) combining; 2) the large-scale fading decoding (LSFD) scheme with local MMSE or MR combining. To improve the system SE performance, we propose a practical uplink precoding scheme based on only the eigenbasis of the UE-side correlation matrices. Moreover, we derive novel closed-form SE expressions for characterizing the LSFD scheme with the MR combining. Numerical results validate the accuracy of our derived expressions and show that the proposed precoding scheme can significantly improve the SE performance compared with the scenario without any precoding scheme.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

Multi-Point Integrated Sensing and Communication: Fusion Model and Functionality Selection

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) represents a paradigm shift, where previously competing wireless transmissions are jointly designed to operate in harmony via the shared use of the hardware platform for improving the spectral and energy efficiencies. However, due to adversarial factors such as fading and interference, ISAC may suffer from high sensing uncertainties. This paper presents a multi-point ISAC (MPISAC) system that fuses the outputs from multiple ISAC devices for achieving higher sensing performance by exploiting multi-view data redundancy. Furthermore, we propose to effectively explore the performance trade-off between sensing and communication via a functionality selection module that adaptively determines the working state (i.e., sensing or communication) of an ISAC device. The crux of our approach is to derive a fusion model that predicts the fusion accuracy via hypothesis testing and optimal voting analysis. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of MPISAC over various benchmark schemes and show that the proposed approach can effectively span the trade-off region in ISAC systems.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, to appear in IEEE Wireless Communications Letter