Impact of mobility on the downlink performance of cell-free massive MIMO systems

In this paper, we analyze the achievable downlink spectral efficiency of cell-free massive multiple input multiple output (CF-mMIMO) systems, accounting for the effects of channel aging (caused by user mobility) and pilot contamination. We consider two cases, one where user equipments (UEs) rely on downlink pilots beamformed by the access points (APs) to estimate downlink channel, and another where UEs utilize statistical channel state information (CSI) for data decoding. For comparison, we also consider cellular mMIMO and derive its achievable spectral efficiency with channel aging and pilot contamination in the above two cases. Our results show that, in CF-mMIMO, downlink training is preferable over statistical CSI when the length of the data sequence is chosen optimally to maximize the spectral efficiency. In cellular mMIMO, however, either one of the two schemes may be better depending on whether user fairness or sum spectral efficiency is prioritized. Furthermore, the CF-mMIMO system generally outperforms cellular mMIMO even after accounting for the effects of channel aging and pilot contamination. Through numerical results, we illustrate the effect of various system parameters such as the maximum user velocity, uplink/downlink pilot lengths, data duration, network densification, and provide interesting insights into the key differences between cell-free and cellular mMIMO systems. (c) 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.