Cell-Free Massive MIMO: Distributed Signal Processing and Energy Efficiency

In this era of rapid wireless technological advancements, wireless connectivity between humans, humans with machines, and machines with machines is gradually becoming an absolute necessity. The initial motivation for wireless connectivity was to enable voice communication between humans over a geographical area. Thanks to cellular communications advancements in the past decade, cellular wireless connectivity has become a global success, starting from 1G to the present generation 5G. However, the needs of humans often evolve with time, and now the world is witnessing an ever-growing demand for the internet with high data rates besides reliable voice communication. Current cellular networks suffer from non-uniform data rates across a cell, i.e., users at the cell center and the cell edges experience significant variations in signal-to-noise ratio, making the cellular technology less reliable to meet the future data demands. Moreover, cellular networks operating as cells, i.e., an access point (AP, the term we would use instead of base station) serving the users within its geographical location, cannot leverage the network’s total capacity without cooperation among APs of the neighboring cells. One potential solution is moving away from the cell to cell-free networks wherein all the APs will serve all the users within the geographical coverage area. Thus, there is a need for a paradigm shift in how cellular networks operate. Towards the goal mentioned above to fully leverage the network capacity, the Cell-Free Massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) technology is expected to be the next potential technology beyond 5G combining the benefits of Massive MIMO and cell-free distributed architectures. Distributed architectures require distributed signal processing algorithms, and also energy consumption of the network is crucial. Keeping in view the practical ease in deployment, we consider a sequentially connected CellFree Massive MIMO network called a “radio stripe”. In the first part of the thesis, we focus on developing an optimal sequential algorithm in the sense of mean-square-error (MSE) which has the same performance as that of centralized Cell-Free Massive MIMO implementation with the