RIS-assisted Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems With Two-Timescale Design and Hardware Impairments

Integrating the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) into a cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) system is an effective solution to achieve high system capacity with low cost and power consumption. However, existing works of RIS-assisted systems mostly assumed perfect hardware, while the impact of hardware impairments (HWIs) is generally ignored. In this paper, we consider the general Rician fading channel and uplink transmission of the RIS-assisted CF-mMIMO system under transceiver impairments and RIS phase noise. To reduce the feedback overhead and power consumption, we propose a two-timescale transmission scheme to optimize the passive beamformers at RISs with statistical channel state information (CSI), while transmit beamformers at access points (APs) are designed based on instantaneous CSI. Also, the maximum ratio combining (MRC) detection is applied to the central processing unit (CPU). On this basis, we derive the closed-form approximate expression of the achievable rate, based on which the impact of HWIs and the power scaling laws are analyzed to draw useful theoretical insights. To maximize the users' sum rate or minimum rate, we first transform our rate expression into a tractable form, and then optimize the phase shifts of RISs based on an accelerated gradient ascent method. Finally, numerical results are presented to demonstrate the correctness of our derived expressions and validate the previous analysis, which provide some guidelines for the practical application of the imperfect RISs in the CF-mMIMO with transceiver HWIs.

Two-Timescale Transmission Design for RIS-Aided Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems

This paper investigates the performance of two-timescale transmission design for uplink reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) systems. We consider the Rician channel model and design the passive beamforming of RISs based on the long-time statistical channel state information (CSI), while the maximum ratio combining (MRC) technique is utilized to design the active beamforming of base stations (BSs) based on the instantaneous overall channels, which are the superposition of the direct and RIS-reflected channels. Firstly, we derive the closed-form expressions of uplink achievable rate for arbitrary numbers of BS antennas and RIS reflecting elements. Relying on the derived expressions, we theoretically analyze the benefits of RIS-aided cell-free mMIMO systems and draw explicit insights. Then, based on closed-form expressions under statistical CSI, we maximize the sum user rate and the minimum user rate by optimizing the phase shifts of the RISs based on the genetic algorithm (GA). Finally, the numerical results demonstrate the feasibility and the benefits of deploying large-size RISs into conventional cell-free mMIMO systems. Besides, our results validate the effectiveness of the proposed two-timescale scheme in the RIS-aided cell-free mMIMO systems.