Decentralized Beamforming for Cell-Free Massive MIMO with Unsupervised Learning

Abstract

Cell-free massive MIMO (CF-mMIMO) systems represent a promising approach to increase the spectral efficiency of wireless communication systems. However, near-optimal beamforming solutions require a large amount of signaling exchange between access points (APs) and the network controller (NC). In this letter, we propose two unsupervised deep neural networks (DNN) architectures, fully and partially distributed, that can perform decentralized coordinated beamforming with zero or limited communication overhead between APs and NC, for both fully digital and hybrid precoding. The proposed DNNs achieve near-optimal sum-rate while also reducing computational complexity by 10-24x compared to conventional near-optimal solutions.