Ubiquitous cell-free Massive MIMO communications

• Published in: EURASIP journal on wireless communications and networking Vol. 2019; no. 1; pp. 1 - 13
• Main Authors: Interdonato, Giovanni, Björnson, Emil, Quoc Ngo, Hien, Frenger, Pål, Larsson, Erik G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 05.08.2019; Springer Nature B.V; SpringerOpen
• Subjects: Antenna arrays; Antennas; Beamforming; Cell-free Massive MIMO; Cellular communication; Communications Engineering; Densification; Distributed processing; Energy conversion efficiency; Engineering; Hauling; Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet); Interference; MIMO communication; Multiplexing; Networks; Radio stripe system; Review; Signal processing; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Traffic management; Radio stripe system; Distributed processing; Cell-free Massive MIMO
• ISSN: 1687-1499; 1687-1472; 1687-1499
• DOI: 10.1186/s13638-019-1507-0

Since the first cellular networks were trialled in the 1970s, we have witnessed an incredible wireless revolution. From 1G to 4G, the massive traffic growth has been managed by a combination of wider bandwidths, refined radio interfaces, and network densification, namely increasing the number of antennas per site. Due its cost-efficiency, the latter has contributed the most. Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is a key 5G technology that uses massive antenna arrays to provide a very high beamforming gain and spatially multiplexing of users and hence increases the spectral and energy efficiency (see references herein). It constitutes a centralized solution to densify a network, and its performance is limited by the inter-cell interference inherent in its cell-centric design. Conversely, ubiquitous cell-free Massive MIMO refers to a distributed Massive MIMO system implementing coherent user-centric transmission to overcome the inter-cell interference limitation in cellular networks and provide additional macro-diversity. These features, combined with the system scalability inherent in the Massive MIMO design, distinguish ubiquitous cell-free Massive MIMO from prior coordinated distributed wireless systems. In this article, we investigate the enormous potential of this promising technology while addressing practical deployment issues to deal with the increased back/front-hauling overhead deriving from the signal co-processing.