Uplink Detection and Accessing Scheme for Scalable Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems

A scalable cell-free massive MIMO (SCF-mMIMO) system where all user equipments (UEs) and access points (APs) employ finite resolution digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) over correlated Rician fading is presented and analysed in this paper. A closed-form expression for the uplink (UL) spectral efficiency (SE) using maximal-ratio combining (MRC) detection for centralized scheme is first derived. Moreover, a novel low complexity partial MMSE (P-MMSE) detector is proposed, which achieves very similar SE performance and maintains much less computational complexity in comparison with the original partial MMSE (P-MMSE) detector. In addition, a joint algorithm consisting of AP cluster formation, pilot assignment, and power control policy is proposed, which yields much higher SE performance than random pilot assignment and user-group based pilot assignment policies do, and meanwhile improves the quality of service (QoS) fairness for all accessing UEs as compared to the equal power transmit policy.