Spectral and Energy Efficiency in Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems Over Correlated Rician Fading

In this article, we investigate the downlink (DL) of a cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system over spatially correlated Rician fading, in which many distributed access points (APs) equipped with multiple antennas serve single-antenna users. The APs apply minimum mean-square error channel estimation to obtain the uplink channel state information (CSI). Furthermore, in order to obtain DL CSI at users, this article considers the use of maximum-ratio transmission to beamform DL pilots in the DL beamforming training (BT) phase. For such a system, we derive the closed-form expressions of the sum spectral efficiency (SE) and total energy efficiency (EE). Based on the obtained closed-form expressions, we develop two successive approximation algorithms to improve the sum SE and total EE by optimizing the power control coefficients of DL data and pilot. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithms in improving the sum SE and total EE. In addition, the numerical results also show that the sum SE of a cell-free massive MIMO system with exploiting the BT scheme can be significantly improved over the system without employing the BT scheme.