Joint Power Allocation and Hybrid Beamforming for Cell-Free mmWave Multiple-Input Multiple-Output with Statistical Channel State Information

Abstract

Cell-free millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) can effectively overcome the shadow fading effect and provide macro gain to boost the throughput of communication networks. Nevertheless, the majority of the existing studies have overlooked the user-centric characteristics and practical fronthaul capacity limitations. To solve these practical problems, we introduce a resource allocation scheme using statistical channel state information (CSI) for uplink user-centric cell-free mmWave MIMO system. The hybrid beamforming (HBF) architecture is deployed at each access point (AP), while the central processing unit (CPU) only combines the received signals by the large-scale fading decoding (LSFD) method. We further frame the issue of maximizing sum-rate subject to the fronthaul capacity constraint and minimum rate constraint. Based on the alternating optimization (AO) and fractional programming method, we present an algorithm aimed at optimizing the users’ transmit power for the power allocation (PA) subproblem. Then, an algorithm relying on the majorization–minimization (MM) method is given for the HBF subproblem, which jointly optimizes the HBF and the LSFD coefficients.