Cell-Free Massive MIMO systems

Abstract

Cell-Free Massive MIMO systems comprise a large number of distributed, low cost, and low power access point antennas, connected to a network controller. The number of antennas is significantly larger than the number of users. The system is not partitioned into cells and each user is served by all access point antennas simultaneously. In this paper, we define cell-free systems and analyze algorithms for power optimization and linear pre-coding. Compared with the conventional small-cell scheme, Cell-Free Massive MIMO can yield more than ten-fold improvement in terms of 5%-outage rate.