Joint Fronthaul Load Balancing and Computation Resource Allocation in Cell-Free User-Centric Massive MIMO Networks

We consider scalable cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output networks under an
open radio access network
paradigm comprising user equipments (UEs), radio units (RUs), and decentralized processing units (DUs). UEs are served by dynamically allocated user-centric clusters of RUs. The corresponding
cluster processors
(implementing the physical layer for each user) are hosted by the DUs as
software-defined virtual network functions
. Unlike the current literature, mainly focused on the characterization of the user rates under unrestricted fronthaul communication and computation, in this work we explicitly take into account the fronthaul topology, the limited fronthaul communication capacity, and computation constraints at the DUs. In particular, we systematically address the new problem of joint fronthaul load balancing and allocation of the computation resource. As a consequence of our new optimization framework, we present representative numerical results high-lighting the existence of an optimal number of quantization bits in the analog-to-digital conversion at the RUs.