Uplink Performance of Cell-Free Symbiotic Radio With Hardware Impairments for IoT

Cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output symbiotic radio (CF-SR) has recently been introduced as a promising solution for the Internet of Things (IoT), offering cost advantages and more uniform coverage performance for user devices. However, most previous studies assume perfect hardware, which is impractical in IoT systems. In this article, we investigate the uplink performance of CF-SR systems in the presence of hardware impairments (HWIs). We adopt two novel schemes for hybrid combining, namely hybrid maximum ratio (HMR) and hybrid local minimum mean square error (HL-MMSE), both of which effectively enhance the spectral efficiency (SE) of the backscattering link. We derive closed-form expressions for the achievable SE of both conventional MR and HMR combining schemes, taking into account the imperfect channel state information (CSI) and HWIs. The simulation results that both the direct and backscattering links are primarily limited by HWIs including multiplicative and additive distortions from the device side. We apply the differential evolution (DE) algorithm for power control to maximize the minimum SE, and the results show that the DE algorithm improves the minimum SE by approximately 52%, avoiding further degradation of the SE of the weakest device due to the impact of HWIs.