Unsupervised-Learning Power Control for Cell-Free Wireless Systems

This paper studies the viability of feedforward neural networks (NNs) for centralized power control in the uplink of cell-free wireless systems with matched-filter reception. The formulation relies only on large-scale channel behaviors as inputs, without the need for user location information, and on unsupervised learning, to avoid the onerous precomputation of training data that supervised learning would necessitate for every system or environment modification. Two different power control objectives are entertained, and for both of them the NN closely approximates the optimum solutions produced by convex solvers while vastly reducing the complexity, thereby opening the door to power control implementations for very large systems.