Mobility Performance Analysis of Scalable Cell-Free Massive MIMO

International Conference on Communications, pp. 2543–2548

Abstract

While scalable cell-free massive MIMO (CF-mMIMO) shows advantages in static conditions, the impact of its changing serving access point (AP) set in a mobile network is not yet addressed. In this paper we first derive the CPU cluster and AP handover rates of scalable CF-mMIMO as exact numerical results and tight closed form approximations. We then use our closed form handover rate result to analyse the mobility-aware throughput. We compare the mobility-aware spectral efficiency (SE) of scalable CF-mMIMO against distributed MIMO with pure network- and UE-centric AP selection, for different AP densities and handover delays. Our results reveal an important trade-off for future dense networks with low control delay: under moderate to high mobility, scalable CF-mMIMO maintains its advantage for the 95th-percentile users but at the cost of degraded median SE.

Authors 3

1. Yunlu Xiao Aachen Institute for Networked Systems (INETS)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University,Institute for Networked Systems,Aachen,Germany

   Institute for Networked Systems, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

2. Petri Mähönen Aachen Institute for Networked Systems (INETS)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University,Institute for Networked Systems,Aachen,Germany

   Institute for Networked Systems, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

3. Ljiljana Simić Aachen Institute for Networked Systems (INETS)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University,Institute for Networked Systems,Aachen,Germany

   Institute for Networked Systems, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany