2018 IEEE 19th International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC)

FDD-based Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems

Seungnyun Kim and Byonghyo Shim
Institute of New Media and Communications, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Seoul National University, Korea
Email: {snkim, bshim}@islab.snu.ac.kr

Abstract—Cell-free massive MIMO system is a promising

technology of 5G wireless communications that provide a user-
centric coverage to the user by the basestation cooperation. Most
prior works on the cell-free massive MIMO systems assume the
time division duplexing (TDD) systems, although the frequency
division duplexing (FDD) systems dominate the current wireless
communications. In the FDD systems, CSI acquisition and feed-
back overhead are serious concerns when the number of antennas
is large. To address these problems, we use the property that the
uplink and downlink multipath components are similar, so-called
angle reciprocity. By exploiting the angle reciprocity, basestation
can directly acquire multipath component information from
the uplink pilot signal. In this paper, we propose multipath Fig. 1: Comparison between (a) cellular systems and (b) cell-
component estimation technique and basestation cooperation free massive MIMO systems
scheme based on the multipath components for the FDD-based
cell-free massive MIMO systems. Simulation results show that the in significant improvements in the spectral efficiency and the
proposed multipath component estimation technique outperforms
the conventional subspace-based technique. Also, we show that energy efficiency over the cellular systems [2].
the FDD-based cell-free massive MIMO systems substantially Most of efforts on the cell-free massive MIMO systems
improve energy efficiency over the cellular systems. to date are based on the time division duplexing (TDD)
systems. Rationale behind this choice is to exploit the channel
I. I NTRODUCTION reciprocity in the acquisition of the downlink channel state
information (CSI) [2]–[4]. However, in practice, the channel
The 5G wireless systems are expected to bring thousand- reciprocity may not be accurate because of the calibration error
fold capacity improvement over the current 4G LTE systems. in the RF chains. Also, due to the lack of the downlink training
As a means to achieve this relentless goal, network densifica- in the TDD systems, users may not be able to learn the instan-
tion has received much attention in recent years [1]. Network taneous CSI, and thus the system suffers a degradation in the
densification improves the capacity of cellular systems via the detection and the decoding performances. These observations,
reduced path loss and the spectrum reuse. However, there are together with the fact that the frequency division duplexing
also some side-effects such as an increase in the inter-cell (FDD) systems dominate the current wireless communications
interference (ICI) and a frequent handover for the fast moving and have many benefits, motivate us to develop the FDD-based
users. To get over these problems, an approach to remove cell-free massive MIMO systems.
the notation of cell from the cellular systems, called cell-free One well-known problem of FDD systems is that the
massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems, has been amount of downlink CSI feedback scales linearly with the
proposed [2]. number of antennas [5]. In fact, since more than one bases-
In the cell-free massive MIMO systems, more than one tation should receive the downlink CSI feedback from each
basestations cooperatively serve multiple users (see Fig. 1). user, CSI acquisition and feedback overhead are tricky and
The basestations are connected to the central processing unit difficult problems in the FDD-based cell-free massive MIMO
(CPU) via an advanced backhaul link. Since the cell associa- systems. To address these problems, we exploit the property
tion is not strictly limited by the regional cell, notions like cell, that the multipath components, i.e., angle and complex gain,
cell boundary, and handover are unnecessary in the cell-free in the uplink and downlink channels are similar. This feature,
massive MIMO systems. Moreover, by exploiting the favorable henceforth referred to as angle reciprocity, holds true even for
propagation and channel hardening properties, the cell-free the FDD systems as long as the uplink and downlink carrier
massive MIMO systems can effectively control ICI, resulting frequencies are not too far from each other (less than several
GHz) [6]. To exploit the angle reciprocity, a technique that can
This work was sponsored by the National Research Foundation of Korea efficiently extract the multipath components from the uplink
(NRF) grant funded by the Korean government(MSIP) (2016R1A2B3015576)
and the international cooperation program managed by National Research pilot signal is needed. Also, a basestation cooperation strategy
Foundation of Korea(2016K1A3A1A20006019) based on the multipath components is also important.

978-1-5386-3512-4/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE

 2018 IEEE 19th International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC)

The primary purpose of this paper is to propose FDD- To model a realistic system, we assume that the differences
based cell-free massive MIMO systems that do not require between uplink and downlink multipath components, θ̃i and
any feedback from the user. The key idea behind the pro- β̃i , are i.i.d random variables with zero mean and variance
posed scheme is to extract the multipath components used σθ2 , σβ2  1 [10].
for the basestation cooperation from the uplink pilot signal.
To this end, we propose a computationally efficient multipath
component estimation technique based on the gradient descent III. FDD-BASED C ELL -F REE M ASSIVE MIMO S YSTEM
method. Furthermore, we propose the precoding and the power In this section, we present the FDD-based cell-free massive
allocation schemes that employ the multipath components MIMO systems that directly acquire multipath components
exclusively. To be specific, by using the property that the angle from the uplink pilot signal and use them for the bases-
information represents the channel direction, the proposed tation cooperation. We first explain the proposed multipath
angle-based precoding scheme can effectively reduce ICI and component estimation technique based on the gradient de-
also improves the spectral efficiency of the user. Moreover, scent method. We next discuss the angle-based zero-forcing
since each propagation path has a different path gain, a proper (ZF) precoding that only requires the angle information in a
power allocation to the propagation paths can improve the precoding design. In our analysis, we obtain a closed-form
energy efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed rate expression that takes into account the imperfect angle
multipath component estimation technique outperforms the reciprocity. Finally, we discuss an efficient way to allocate
conventional subspace-based technique [7]. Moreover, the pro- the transmission power into each propagation path.
posed FDD-based cell-free massive MIMO systems save 19%
A. Gradient Descent-Based Multipath Component Estimation
of transmission power over the conventional cellular systems.
There are various techniques to estimate the multipath
II. C HANNEL M ODEL components. Among these, subspace-based techniques (MU-
SIC and ESPRIT) [7] are widely used due to the computa-
We consider M basestations with uniform linear array
tional benefit. However, in the massive MIMO regime, even
(ULA) of N antennas and K users with single antenna. We
subspace-based techniques which are known to be simple to
use a flat fading, one-ring scattering channel model with P
implement are infeasible due to the huge computational over-
propagation paths. Owing to the angle reciprocity, we can
head caused by the N -dimensional eigenvalue decomposition
safely assume that the uplink angle-of-arrival (AOA) and
(EVD) operation. Whereas, the proposed technique employs
downlink angle-of-departure (AOD) are similar. Moreover,
the gradient descent method that requires only P -dimensional
since the large-scale fading coefficient is not a function of
EVD operation. Since the number of antennas N is much
frequency, we also assume that the uplink and downlink
larger than the number of paths P in the massive MIMO
large-scale fading coefficients are similar. Whereas, uplink
regime, the proposed scheme is computationally efficient.
and downlink small-scale fading coefficients are distinct since
Let φk ∈ C1×τ be the uplink pilot signal with τ symbol
these are functions of frequency [8]. In the sequel, AOAs
and unit norm sent by the user k. In order to distinguish
(or AODs) and large-scale fading coefficients are collectively
the propagation paths of distinct users, we design the uplink
called the multipath components of the channel. In this setting,
training time of users in an non-overlapping fashion. In this
the uplink and downlink channels are given by [9]
setting, the received signal Ymk ∈ CN ×τ at the basestation
P 
 m sent by the user k is given by
hl = βil gil a(θil , λl ), l ∈ {UL, DL}, (1) √
i=1 Ymk = ρr hUL mk φk + Nmk , (6)
where βil is the large-scale fading coefficient which accounts where ρr is the uplink transmission power and Nmk ∈ CN ×τ
for the path loss and the shadowing effect, gil ∼ CN (0, 1) is the Gaussian noise with variance σn2 IN . We assume that
is the small-scale fading coefficient, and λl is the channel ρr is known to the basestations. Multiplying (6) by φH k and
wavelength. We assume that the small-scale fading coefficients collecting T samples, we have
are i.i.d. random variables. In addition, a(θ, λ) is the array √
Y(t)φH = ρr AUL BUL sUL (t) + NφH
steering vector given by √
= ρr AUL dUL (t) + n̄, t = 1, · · · , T, (7)
1 2πd sin θ 2πd sin θ
a(θ, λ) = √ [1, e−j λ , · · · , e−j(N −1) λ ]T , (2)
N where dUL = BUL sUL and n̄ = NφH ∼ CN (0, σn2 IN ). For
brevity, we henceforth omit the basestation and the user indices
where d is the antenna spacing. Note that the channel vector
for brevity. Multiple samples of (7) are combined into a matrix
in (1) can be represented as hl = Al Bl sl where
form as
  √
Al = a(θ1l , λl ), · · · , a(θPl , λl ) , (3) Ȳ = ρr AUL DUL + N̄, (8)
 
Bl = diag( β1l , · · · , βPl ), (4) where Ȳ = [Y(1)φH , · · · , Y(T )φH ], DUL =
[d (1), · · · , d (T )], and N̄ = [n̄(1), · · · , n̄(T )].
UL UL
sl = [g1l , · · · , gPl ]T . (5) Then, the log-likelihood function of (8) is
 2018 IEEE 19th International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC)

The computation of the gradient function requires only

Algorithm 1 Gradient descent-based multipath component small-dimensional EVD of size P and matrix multiplications
estimation algorithm whereas the conventional subspace-based techniques require
UL
Input: Ȳ ∈ CN ×T , P ,  large-dimensional EVD of size N . Once θ̂ and ÂUL are
Initialization: θ UL (0) = 0P , n = 1
obtained, we next estimate the large-scale fading coefficients
Iteration: βiUL . From (11), we can estimate DUL and the covariance
1: Compute AUL , CUL , and ∇θ UL f for θ (n−1)
UL matrix R̂d = T1 D̂UL D̂UL,H . Note that the original covariance
2: θ (n) = θ (n−1) − αn ∇θ UL f (θ (n−1) )
UL UL UL matrix Rd is given by
 
3: if |f (θ (n) ) − f (θ (n−1) )| < , then
UL UL
Rd = E dUL dUL,H
UL  
4: θ̂ = θ UL
(n) = BUL E sUL sUL,H BUL,H
UL 
5:
 for θ̂
Compute ÂUL −1 = diag β1UL , · · · , βPUL . (15)
1
6: D̂ = √ρr ÂUL,H ÂUL
UL
ÂUL,H Ȳ Hence, we can obtain the estimate of the large-scale fading
7: R̂d = T1 D̂UL D̂UL,H coefficients as
8: βˆUL = diag(R̂ ) d β̂
UL
= [β̂1UL , · · · , β̂PUL ]T = diag(R̂d ). (16)
9: break
10: end if
11: n = n + 1
UL UL B. Angle-Based Zero-Forcing Precoding
Output: θ̂ , β̂
In this work, we use the zero-forcing (ZF) precoding
that can efficiently suppress ICI. When compared to MMSE
precoding [11], the ZF precoding vector enforces strict or-
1 √ thogonalization of all other user channel vectors. To do so,
L(θ UL, DUL, σn2 ) = −N ln σn2 − Ȳ− ρr AUL DUL 2F , (9) the conventional ZF precoding employs all the downlink CSIs
σn2
from the users. However, the angle-based ZF precoding used
where θ UL = [θ1UL , · · · , θPUL ]T is the uplink angle vector. in this work is distinct from the conventional ZF precoding
Since L is a concave function of σn2 and DUL , optimal in the sense that only the angle information of the channel is
estimates σ̂n2 and D̂UL can be obtained by taking a partial required in the precoding design.
derivative with respect to σn2 and DUL . That is, The key idea of the angle-based ZF precoding is to
1 √ make the precoding vector orthogonal to all other array
σ̂n2 = Ȳ − ρr ÂUL D̂UL F , (10) steering vectors. Let θmk,iUL
be the estimated uplink AOAs.
N
1  UL,H UL −1 UL,H We collect the corresponding array steering vectors into
D̂UL =√ Â Â Â Ȳ, (11) Âmk = [a(θmk,1 UL
, λDL ), · · · , a(θmk,P
UL
, λDL )] and Âm =
ρr
[Âm1 , · · · , ÂmK ]. Then, the angle-based ZF precoding vec-
where ÂUL is the optimal estimate of AUL . By substituting ZF
tor ŵmk for the basestation m and the user k is defined as
(10) and (11) into (9) and after some manipulations, we have
UL  
P

θ̂ = argmin tr P⊥ AUL Ȳ Ȳ
H
, (12) ŵmk = γmk,i ĝmk,i = Ĝmk γ mk , (17)
i=1
where P⊥ AUL = IN − A (A
UL UL,H UL −1 UL,H
A ) A is the or-
thogonal projection matrix onto the orthogonal complement of where ĝmk,i is the ((k − 1)P + i)-th column of Ĝm =
 −1
AUL . For simplicity, we let f (θ UL ) = tr P⊥ Ȳ Ȳ H
in the Âm (ÂHm Âm ) which corresponds to a(θmk,i UL
, λDL ) and
AUL
sequel. Note that (12) is a non-linear P -dimensional optimiza- Ĝmk = [ĝmk,1 , · · · , ĝmk,P ]. Also, γmk,i is the normalized
tion problem. Since it is very difficult to find out the closed- complex weight for the i-th propagation path that satisfies
P 2
i=1 |γmk,i | = 1 and γ mk = [γmk,1 , · · · , γmk,P ] . The
T
form solution of (12), we use the gradient descent method that
finds out the local minimum of the multi-dimensional function. transmit signal at the basestation m is given by
The update equation to find out the angle vector θ UL is 
K
√
θ UL = θ UL − αn ∇θUL f (θ UL xm = ρd ŵmk sk , (18)
(n) (n−1) (n−1) ), (13)
k=1
where θ UL
(n) is the n-th estimate of θ , αn is the n-th step
UL
where sk is the data symbol for the user k satisfying

size determined by the Armijo’s rule, and ∇θUL f is E |sk |2 = 1 and ρd is the maximum transmit power sat-
  
∇θUL f = Im diag CUL AUL,H EP⊥ H UL
AUL Ȳ Ȳ A (A
UL,H UL −1
A ) , isfying
 (14)   K
2
where C UL
= diag cos θ1 , · · · , cos θP
UL UL
and E = E x 
m 2 = ρd Ĝmk γ mk 22 ≤ ρd . (19)
√2πd diag (0, · · · , N − 1). k=1
N λUL
 2018 IEEE 19th International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC)

Then, the received signal at the user k is given by it can be relaxed into a convex semi-definite program (SDP)
using the semi-definite relaxation (SDR) [12]. By introducing

M
rk = hDL,H a new variable Γmk = γ mk γ H mk , the quadratic constraints can
mk xm +nk
m=1 be transformed into the linear constraints on SP . Since the
rank constraint of Γmk 1 is non-convex, we need to relax the
√  √   DL,H
M M K
= ρd hDL,H
mk ŵmk sk + ρd hmk ŵmj sj +nk , rank constraint to obtain the feasible SDP formulation of (22)
m=1 m=1j=k as
 
S I 
M 
K  
min tr ĜH
mk Ĝmk Γmk
where nk ∼ CN (0, 1) is the additive noise. Note that the {Γmk }
m=1 k=1
received signal can be decomposed into three parts: 1) desired 
M  
2 H
signal part S, 2) ICI part I, and 3) noise wk . If the angle s.t. tr (BUL,2 UL,2 UL,2
mk + σθ Q̂mkk Cmk Bmk Q̂mkk )Γmk −
reciprocity is perfect (σθ2 = σβ2 = 0), then one can easily m=1

show that M K   ξk
 ξk σθ2 tr Q̂H UL,2 UL,2
mkj Cmk Bmk Q̂mkj Γmj ≥ , ∀k
ρ
sDL,H
mk Bmk γ mj if k = j
DL m=1j=k
d
hDL,H
mk ŵmj = (20)  
0 otherwise. 
K
tr ĜH
mk Ĝmk Γmk ≤ 1, ∀m
One can observe that the ICI is removed. However, in a real- k=1

istic system where the angle reciprocity is imperfect (σθ = 0 Γmk  0, ∀m, k. (23)
and σβ = 0), the ICI still remains in the received signal and
The relaxed problem (23) is a convex SDP and can be solved
hence there is a loss in the data rate. In the following theorem,
by the convex optimization tool such as CVX [13]. Once the
we provide an approximated closed-form expression for the
optimal variable {Γ̂mk } are obtained, we can find the rank
achievable data rate when the angle reciprocity is imperfect.
one approximations of {Γ̂mk } which are feasible for the
Theorem III.1. The approximated closed-form expression of original problem (22) using the rank reduction methods [14].
achievable rate for the user k is
⎛  ⎞
M 2
2 2
IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS
⎜ m=1 BUL
mkγ mk +σθ BmkCmkQ̂mkkγ mk
UL UL
⎟
2 2
Rk ≈ log2⎜
⎝1+ M K 2
⎟,
⎠ In this section, we evaluate the performances of the pro-
σθ2 m=1 j=k BUL
mk Cmk Q̂mkj γ mj
UL
+ ρ1d posed FDD-based cell-free massive MIMO systems. We con-
2
(21) sider M basestations with N antennas and K users with single
where Q̂mkj ∈ CP ×P is a submatrix of Q̂m = antenna randomly distributed in a square area of 1 × 1km2 . In
−1
m EÂm (Âm Âm ) whose position is [(k − 1)P + 1 :
ÂH H our simulations, the QoS requirements of the users are fixed
kP, (j − 1)P + 1 : jP ]. into 2 bit/symbol. The system bandwidth is set to 10 MHz and
the carrier frequencies of the uplink and downlink channels are
f UL = 49.8GHz and f DL = 50GHz, respectively. The users
C. Power Allocation for Each Propagation Path transmit OFDM pilot signals of τ = 200 symbols with uplink
training power ρr = 200 mW and the number of pilot samples
In this subsection, we discuss how to solve the power
are T = 16. For the multipath channel model, the number of
allocation problem that optimizes the power coefficients γmk,i
propagation paths of the channel is P , the angle spread is 10◦ ,
for each propagation path. Since each propagation path has dif-
DL and the large-scale fading coefficients of LOS and NLOS paths
ferent path gain βmk,i , proper allocation of transmission power
are modeled similarly to the 3GPP LTE standard as [15]
can sufficiently improve the energy efficiency. To this end, we 
formulate the power allocation problem that minimizes the −148 − 35 log10 (dmk ) + zmk,p , LOS
total transmission power of the basestations while satisfying 10 log10 (βmk,p ) =
−158 − 35 log10 (dmk ) + zmk,p , NLOS
the quality of service (QoS) requirements of the users as

M 
K where dmk is the distance between the basestation m and user
min Ĝmk γ mk 22 k in kilometers and zmk,P ∼ N (0, σz2 ) is the shadow fading
{γ mk }
m=1 k=1 variable with σz = 8 dB.
M  UL 2 2 2

Fig. 2 shows the root mean square error (RMSE) per-
m=1 Bmk γ mk 2 +σθ B Cmk Q̂mkk γ mk 2
UL UL

s.t.  K 1
≥ ξk , ∀k formance of the proposed gradient descent-based multipath
σθ2 M 2
j=k Bmk Cmk Q̂mkj γ mj 2 + ρd
UL UL
m=1 component estimation technique for N = 32 and T = 16.

K
For comparison, we use the ESPRIT algorithm, a well-known
Ĝmk γ mk 22 ≤ 1, ∀m, (22) subspace-based multipath component estimation technique [7].
k=1
One can observe that the proposed gradient descent-based
where ξk is the QoS requirement of the user k. (22) is a technique outperforms the subspace-based technique in the
non-convex separable quadratic constraint quadratic program
(QCQP). While the non-convex QCQP is a NP-hard problem, 1Γ is rank one symmetric positive semi-definite matrix (PSD)
mk
 2018 IEEE 19th International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC)

Fig. 2: The RMSE performance of the multipath component Fig. 3: The total transmission power versus the number of
estimation versus SNR for N = 32 and T = 16 basestations for N = 512, P = 4, and T = 16
angle estimation. Also, the normalized RMSE performance R EFERENCES
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