Effective Channel Gain-Based Access Point Selection in Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems

In this paper, we investigate the selection problem of access points (APs) in cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where APs equipped with a large number of antennas are geographically distributed over a wide area with no cell border. These APs simultaneously serve many users, which are randomly distributed all over the area. We first derive formulas to calculate two proposed metrics used to measure the effective channel gain from all users to all APs and the channel quality of each user. Moreover, these metrics are only based on large-scale fading coefficients, which change very slowly in time. Next, we propose an algorithm to effectively sort and connect users to each AP in a sequential manner using these proposed metrics. Simulation results show that cell-free massive MIMO systems using proposed scheme have better performance compared to existing schemes.