On the Performance of Backhaul Constrained Cell-Free Massive MIMO with Linear Receivers

Limited-backhaul cell-free Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), in which the fog radio access network (F-RAN) is implemented to exchange the information between access points (APs) and the central processing unit (CPU), is investigated. We introduce a novel approach where the APs estimate the channel and send back the quantized version of the estimated channel and the quantized version of the received signal to the central processing unit. The Max algorithm and the Bussgang theorem are exploited to model the optimum uniform quantization. The ergodic achievable rates are derived. We show that exploiting microwave wireless backhaul links and using a small number of bits to quantize the estimated channel and the received signal, the performance of limited-backhaul cell-free Massive MIMO closely approaches the performance of cell-free Massive MIMO with perfect backhaul links.