Analysis of UAV Communications in Cell-Free Massive MIMO systems
Abstract
We study support for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications through a cell-free massive MIMO architecture, wherein a large number of access points (APs) is deployed in place of large co-located massive MIMO arrays. We consider also a variation of the pure cell-free architecture by applying a user-centric association approach, where each user is served only from a subset of APs in the network. Under the general assumption that the propagation channel between the mobile stations, either UAVs or ground users (GUEs), and the APs follows a Ricean distribution, we derive closed-form spectral efficiency lower bounds for uplink and downlink with linear minimum mean square error channel estimation. We consider several power allocation and user scheduling strategies for such a system, and, among these, also minimum-rate maximizing power allocation strategies to improve the system fairness. Our numerical results reveal that cell-free massive MIMO architecture and its low-complexity user-centric alternative may provide better performance than a traditional multi-cell massive MIMO network deployment.
- Publication:
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arXiv e-prints
- Pub Date:
- September 2019
- DOI:
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1909.02485
- Bibcode:
- 2019arXiv190902485D
- Keywords:
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- Computer Science - Information Theory;
- Electrical Engineering and Systems Science - Signal Processing
- E-Print:
- double-column, 14 pages, 8 figure, journal paper