Generalized Framework for a Fair Comparison of Cellular and Cooperative Massive MIMO Systems
For researchers and engineers comparing massive MIMO architectures, this work provides a fair comparison framework and reveals that coordinated distributed antenna systems can achieve near-cell-free performance with reduced infrastructure demands.
This paper introduces a graph-based framework for fair comparison of cellular, coordinated, and cell-free massive MIMO systems, deriving compatible spectral efficiency expressions and showing that coordinated, phase-aligned beamforming across spatially distributed antennas is the main source of cooperation gains. In dense deployments with few antennas per AP, coordinated DAS and hybrid cell-free architectures achieve much of the centralized cell-free performance with weaker midhaul requirements.
Cooperative massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) promises large gains over cellular deployments, but existing comparisons of different architectures often mix antenna distribution, inter-site coordination, and processing assumptions. This paper introduces a graph-based framework for fair comparison of cellular, coordinated, and cell-free massive-MIMO systems. We differentiate between two key properties, namely antenna distribution and inter-site cooperation, which yields seven representative system types. We derive compatible uplink and downlink spectral efficiency (SE) expressions, including an uplink bound for detectors with mixed instantaneous and statistical effective channel state information (CSI), and adapt scalable user association and processing rules to all considered architectures. We evaluate these systems using extensive numerical simulations and show that for a fair comparison much larger simulation areas (at least 2.5 $\times$ 2.5 km2) than commonly used are required. We introduce the relative capacity, which measures how closely each architecture approaches centralized cell-free processing. The results show that coordinated, phase-aligned beamforming across spatially distributed antennas is the main source of cooperation gains. In dense deployments with few antennas per access point (AP), coordinated Distributed Antenna System (DAS) and hybrid cell-free architectures achieve much of the centralized cell-free performance while requiring substantially weaker midhaul assumptions.