Table 5 Areas of application of CF massive MIMO
From: Application of cell-free massive MIMO in 5G and beyond 5G wireless networks: a survey
Ref. | Areas of application | Description | Strengths | Limitations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
SWIPT | Promising energy harvesting technology for an energy-limited environment | Optimized achievable energy-rate trade-off and improved EE | Adverse channel effects, reduced throughput | |
Channel hardening | In the regime of a massive number of antennas, fading channels become almost deterministic. This effect is referred to as channel hardening | High SE and reliable performance | Spatial correlation at the APs, pilot contamination and presence of line-of-sight (LoS) propagation | |
Hardware efficiency | Communication networks are generally affected by non-idealities under practical operational conditions. This inevitably degrades the system’s performance dramatically | Economical transceivers | Decrease in hardware qualities, adverse effect of HI at UE, and performance degradation owing to the processing power of APs | |
Power control | Intelligent distribution of transmitter power along various antennas to manage interference and guarantee maximized performance within the system | Improved efficiency of wireless systems and improved throughput to all users | Shadowing effects, multi-objective optimization problem, and the complexity of power allocation algorithm | |
Learning-based CF massive MIMO | It encompasses an ML framework where deep layers enable learning from a large amount of data | Robustness against pilot contamination and improved resource allocation | Shadowing effects and increase in training time as the number of UEs grows large | |
Interference management | Techniques employed to manage interference abounded in wireless networks | Suppression of inter-cell interference | Residual self-interference (RSI) | |
NOMA | An insightful technique in which multiple users are simultaneously served using the same time-frequency resource block | Massive connectivity and attractive SE gains | Imperfect SIC and pilot contamination | |
SE | A vital performance metric considered in the design of wireless communication systems and expressed as the ratio of data rate to bandwidth | Improved area throughput | Spatial correlation | |
EE | An essential energy-saving technique geared toward reducing the total energy consumption in wireless systems | Significant reduction in total power consumption improved radiated EE | Power lows, the trade-off between EE and SE |