Achieving Energy-Efficient Massive URLLC Over Cell-Free Massive MIMO

Achieving energy-efficient massive ultrareliable and low-latency communications (E2-mURLLC) is a promising application prospect for sixth-generation (6G) mobile communication networks. However, there are some insurmountable obstacles, such as a large number of potential users, complex and diverse small-scale and shadow fading, and stringent energy efficiency (EE), reliability, and latency requirements. Considering the above obstacles, we propose a cell-free massive multiple-input- multiple-output (MIMO) architecture based on the K-mu, shadowed fading model, and maximum-ratio combining (MRC) multiuser detection with simple path-loss decoding (S-PLD) to achieve the simultaneous optimization of EE, latency, and reliability. Furthermore, the finite blocklength information theory is used to uncover the relationship among EE, reliability, latency, and achievable data rate when the packet size is small. Simulation results show that compared with the massive MIMO architecture, using our architecture with MRC multiuser detection and S-PLD can support a threefold increase in the number of access users, reduce transmit power by 90%, achieve a nearly 100 times reliability enhancement, and shorten transmission latency by 23.3%. Consequently, a cell-free massive MIMO system with MRC multiuser detection and S-PLD, as a considerable significant potential to facilitate the advancement from URLLC to E2-mURLLC, is promising to support some time-sensitive applications with massive access, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, the Industrial Internet of Things and vehicle-to-vehicle communications.