O-RAN for Energy-Efficient Serving Cluster Formulation in User-Centric Cell-Free MMIMO

The 6G Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MMIMO) networks can follow the so-called User-Centric Cell-Free (UCCF) architecture, where a single user is served by multiple Access Points (APs) coordinated by the Central Processing Unit (CPU). In this paper, we propose how O-RAN functionalities, i.e., rApp-xApp pair, can be used for energy-efficient Serving Cluster Formulation (SCF). Simulation studies show up to 37\% gain in Energy Efficiency (EE) of the proposed solution over the state-of-the-art Network-Centric (NC) designs.
Comment: Accepted for presentation during The 2nd Workshop on Next-generation Open and Programmable Radio Access Networks (NG-OPERA), organized in conjunction with IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, May 20, 2024