Enabling Heterogeneity: Cell-Free Massive MIMO OFDM Systems

In this paper, a comprehensive and detailed uplink performance analysis is provided for cell-free massive multipleinput multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CF m-MIMO OFDM) systems, which consider the impact of multiple user equipment (UE) heterogeneous factors. This is the first performance analysis work on CF m-MIMO OFDM systems that simultaneously accounts for the heterogeneous mobility speed, activation probability and serving priority. Considering that UE's serving priority determines the amount of its allocated time-frequency resources, a novel closed-form expression of uplink spectral efficiency (SE) is derived by weighting each UE's SE based on its allocated time-frequency resources. The derived SE expression can quantify the impact of multiple UE heterogeneous factors on the uplink performance. Additionally, the SE performance analysis of local processing and fully centralized processing is also included for comparison. Simulation results show that CF m-MIMO OFDM systems under multiple UE heterogeneous factors outperform existing CF m-MIMO systems in terms of the 90 %-likely uplink SE, and allow a trade-off among fronthaul overhead, complexity and SE performance.