Scalable Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems: Impact of Hardware Impairments

peer reviewedScalable cell-free CF (SCF) massive multiple-input-multiple-output (mMIMO) systems is a promising technology to cover the demands for higher data rates and increasing number of users in fifth generation (5G) networks and beyond. According to this concept, a large number of distributed access points (APs) communicates with the users in the network by means of joint coherent transmission while facing the main challenges against standard CF mMIMO systems being their high fronthaul load and computational complexity. Given that the cost-efficient deployment of such large networks requires low-cost transceivers being prone to unavoidable hardware imperfections, in this work, we focus on their impact on the advantageous SCF mMIMO systems by means of a general model accounting for both additive and multiplicative hardware impairments (HWIs). Notably, the scalability, depending on the time-variant characteristics of the network, is clearly affected by means of HWIs being time-varying. There is no other work in the literature studying the phase noise (PN) in CF mMIMO systems or in general any HWIs in SCF mMIMO systems. Hence, we derive upper and lower bounds on the uplink capacity accounting for HWIs. Especially, the lower bound is derived in closed-form by means of the theory of deterministic equivalents (DEs) and after obtaining the optimal hardware-aware (HA) partial minimum mean-squared error (PMMSE) combiner. Among the interesting findings, we observe that separate local oscillators (SLOs) outperform a common LO (CLO) architecture, and the additive transmit distortion degrades more the performance than the receive distortion