Impact of Antenna Distribution on Spectral and Energy Efficiency of Cell-Free Massive MIMO With Transmit Power Control Algorithms

Cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) systems are expected to provide faster and more robust connections to user equipments by cooperation of a massive number of distributed access points (APs), and to be one of the key technologies for beyond 5G (B5G). CF-mMIMO systems with multiple-antenna APs have been investigated from various viewpoints recently. However, no comprehensive analysis of the impact of antenna distribution on CF-mMIMO system performance has been done so far, which is important for practical deployment. Besides spectral efficiency, in B5G, energy efficiency of user equipments is one of the key indicators because various kinds of battery-limited devices connect to the network. Thus, this paper provides a comprehensive performance analysis of the impact of antenna distribution on the performance indicators, while considering several combining/precoding schemes and transmit power control algorithms. For uplink maximal-ratio combining, the concentrated deployment has the best performance thanks to the channel hardening and favorable propagation phenomena. On the other hand, the concentrated deployment prominently suffers from shadowing effects. For uplink/downlink minimum mean-square error combining with transmit power control, the semi-distributed deployments show the best performance, and it implies that we can reduce the number of APs to 1/4 for uplink and to 1/2 for downlink while keeping the same performance as the fully-distributed deployment.