Asynchronous Centralized and Distributed Precoding for Extensive Cell-Free OFDM with Adaptive Fronthaul Overhead

Cell-free is considered a promising technology for the future network, which adopts a large number of distributed antennas to provide a uniformly good service. However, current researches under the long-term evolution standard mostly ignore the problem of asynchronous transmission brought by the different transmission delays due to the geographical distance differences, and assume that the system is perfectly synchronized. On the other, these works often do not consider a distributed method with controllable fronthaul overhead compatible with cell-free. To enable an extensive cell-free in the sixth generation, we derive an asynchronous analysis framework and propose a centralized and a distributed downlink precoding method respectively. What is more important, we have verified that cell-free suffers from inter-carrier-interference and inter-symbol-interference under the 5th generation new radio standard. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work implementing a distributed asynchronous precoding method in an extensive cell-free, and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two precoding methods, compared to naive precoding ignoring the asynchronous impact.