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We consider fairness scheduling in a user-centric cell-free massive MIMO network, where L remote radio units, each with M antennas, serve K « LM user equipments (UEs). Recent results show that the maximum network sum throughput is achieved where Kact « LM 2 UEs are simultaneously active in any given time-frequency slots. However, the number of users K in the network is usually much larger. This requires that users are scheduled over the time-frequency resource and achieve a certain throughput rate as an average over the slots. We impose throughput fairness among UEs with a scheduling approach aiming to maximize a concave component-wise non-decreasing network utility function of the per-user throughput rates. In cell-free user-centric networks, the pilot and cluster assignment is usually done for a given set of active users. Combined with fairness scheduling, this requires pilot and cluster reassignment at each scheduling slot, involving an enormous overhead of control signaling exchange between network entities. We propose a fixed pilot and cluster assignment scheme (independent of the scheduling decisions), which outperforms the baseline method in terms of UE throughput, while requiring much less control information exchange between network entities.

We consider a cell-free wireless system operated in Time Division Duplex (TDD) mode with localized user-centric clusters of remote radio units (RUs). Since the uplink pilot dimensions per channel coherence slot is limited, co-pilot users might incur mutual pilot contamination. In the current literature, it is assumed that the long-term statistical knowledge of all user channels is available. This enables MMSE channel estimation or simplified dominant subspace projection, which achieves significant pilot decontamination under certain assumptions on the channel covariance matrices. However, estimating the channel covariance matrix or even just its dominant subspace at all RUs forming a user cluster is not an easy task. In fact, if not properly designed, a piloting scheme for such long-term statistics estimation will also be subject to the contamination problem. In this paper, we propose a new channel subspace estimation scheme explicitly designed for cell-free wireless networks. Our scheme is based on 1) a sounding reference signal (SRS) using latin squares wideband frequency hopping, and 2) a subspace estimation method based on robust Principal Component Analysis (R-PCA). The SRS hopping scheme ensures that for any user and any RU participating in its cluster, only a few pilot measurements will contain strong co-pilot interference. These few heavily contaminated measurements are (implicitly) eliminated by R-PCA, which is designed to regularize the estimation and discount the "outlier" measurements. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves almost perfect subspace knowledge, which in turns yields system performance very close to that with ideal channel state information, thus essentially solving the problem of pilot contamination in cell-free user-centric TDD wireless networks.

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The pilot contamination in cell-free massive multipleinput-multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) must be addressed for accommodating a large number of users. We have investigated a decontamination method called subspace projection (SP). The SP separates interference from co-pilot users by using the orthogonality of subspaces of each users' principal components. The SP based decontamination has a potential to further improve spectral efficiency (SE), which is limited by a non-overloaded pilot assignment (PA) rule where each radio unit (RU) does not assign the same pilot to different users. Motivated by this limitation, this paper introduces semi-overloaded and overloaded PA methods adjusted for the decontamination in order to improve the sum SE of CF systems. Numerical simulations show that the overloaded and semi-overloaded PA give higher SE than that of non-overloaded PA at a high user density scenario.