Over-the-Air Fronthaul Signaling for Uplink Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems

We propose a novel resource-efficient over-the-air (OTA) computation framework to address the huge fronthaul computational and control overhead requirements in cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) networks. We show that the global sufficient statistics to decode the data symbols can be computed OTA using the locally available information at the access points (APs). We provide the essential signal processing aspects at the APs and the central processing unit (CPU) to facilitate the OTA computation of sufficient statistics. The proposed framework scales effectively with an increase in the number of APs. We also make a comprehensive study of the benefits of an OTA framework compared to a conventional digital fronthaul in terms of the overhead associated in transferring the sufficient statistics from the APs to the CPU. To evaluate the performance of the OTA framework, we give closed-form expressions for the mean-square error (MSE) of the estimators of sufficient statistics and the overall data estimator. Furthermore, we assess the symbol error rate (SER) and bit error rate (BER) of the user equipment (UEs) data to demonstrate the efficacy of our method, and benchmark them against the state-of-the-art wired fronthaul networks.