Performance Analysis of RIS-Assisted Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems With Transceiver Hardware Impairments

Integrating reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) into cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a promising approach to enhance the coverage quality, spectral efficiency (SE), and energy efficiency. In this paper, an RIS-assisted cell-free massive MIMO downlink system suffering from the transceiver hardware impairments (T-HWIs) is investigated. To improve the accuracy of the direct estimation (DE) scheme, a modified ON/OFF estimation (MOE) with moderate pilot overhead is proposed. Relying on the knowledge of imperfect channel state information, we derive closed-form expressions of the lower-bound achievable SE with T-HWIs under both DE and MOE schemes. The closed-form results facilitate the investigation of how RIS improves the downlink SE under various system settings and allow us to explore the trade-off strategies between using more hardware-impaired APs and low-cost RISs in terms of the downlink SE and power consumption. Numerical results validate the theoretical analysis and show that the proposed MOE scheme outperforms the DE scheme in terms of the downlink SE. Moreover, the benefits of introducing RIS into hardware-impaired cell-free massive MIMO systems are also illustrated.