Achievable uplink rate analysis for distributed massive MIMO systems with interference from adjacent cells

This work focuses on the multi-cell multi-user distributed massive MIMO (DM-MIMO) systems, of which each user is equipped with single antenna and the base stations (BSs) consists of distributed antenna units. We first investigate the arbitrary BS antenna topology scenario. The derivation indicates that in this case the achievable uplink rate of an arbitrary user in central cell depends on both the number of BS's antennas and the users' access distance to each distributed antenna unit (DAU). As a result, the performance analysis based on the derivations is difficult. To overcome this issue and achieve clearer insight, we then consider a circularly distributed BS antenna array and obtain the asymptotic uplink rate of an arbitrary user by considering the asymptotic case where the number of antennas of BSs tends to infinity. It is achieved that the asymptotic uplink rate only depends on the distance from users' position to the center of reference cell. The presented numerical results show clearly that the distributed massive MIMO systems outperform the centralized ones. Moreover, it is also achieved that the interference from the adjacent cells imposes great impact on system performance. Besides this, in numerical analysis the average asymptotic uplink rate of a user is presented, which is free of the users' position and only depends on the radius of circular antenna arrays. It is achieved the maximum average uplink rate would be achieved when the radius of circularly distributed antenna array goes to its optimization location.