User Fairness in Radio Stripes Networks using Meta-Heuristics optimization

One of the most promising practical implementations of the cell-free massive MIMO network is based on the radio stripe system, which considers that the access points are sequentially connected, sharing the same fronthaul link while serving all user equipment using the same time-frequency resources. This paper considers an uplink power allocation technique that aims to enhance the network spectral efficiency (SE), modelled as an optimization constrained problem explicitly considering the max-min fairness case. Instead of relying on exact globally optimal approaches, with high computational complexity, three different alternative meta-heuristic (MH) based on simulated annealing, differential evolution and particle swarm optimization approaches are explored. The SE performances along with the total run times of the MH approaches are analyzed and compared with the bisection method.