Cell-free massive MIMO (CF mMIMO) is a promising next generation wireless architecture to realize federated learning (FL). However, sensitive information of user equipments (UEs) may be exposed to the involved access points or the central processing unit in practice. To guarantee data privacy, effective privacy-preserving mechanisms are defined in this paper. In particular, we demonstrate and characterize the possibility in exploiting the inherent quantization error, caused by low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and digital-to-analog converters (DACs), for privacy-preserving in a FL CF mMIMO system. Furthermore, to reduce the required uplink training time in such a system, a stochastic non-convex design problem that jointly optimizing the transmit power and the data rate is formulated. To address the problem at hand, we propose a novel power control method by utilizing the successive convex approximation approach to obtain a suboptimal solution. Besides, an asynchronous protocol is established for mitigating the straggler effect to facilitate FL. Numerical results show that compared with the conventional full power transmission, adopting the proposed power control method can effectively reduce the uplink training time under various practical system settings. Also, our results unveil that our proposed asynchronous approach can reduce the waiting time at the central processing unit for receiving all user information, as there are no stragglers that requires a long time to report their local updates.

This article investigates the performance of nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based cell-free massive multiple-input–multiple-output (mMIMO) for the Internet of Things (IoT) considering spatially correlated Rician fading channels. The exact closed form of downlink spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency expressions is derived with three estimators and the maximum ratio transmission by taking the impacts of imperfect successive interference cancellation and pilot contamination into account. Subsequently, the performance of a local-MMSE precoder with the three aforementioned estimators is analyzed. Then, a large-scale fading-based user pairing scheme is proposed to further analyze the system SE. Besides, we formulate the optimum power control design as a max–min problem and a computational efficient suboptimal algorithm is proposed based on the successive convex approximation. Furthermore, our results reveal that the magnitude of the spatial correlation negligibly effects the SE in spatially correlated Rician fading channels. Then, numerical results confirm the positive effect of the proposed power control scheme. Also, our results further illustrate that NOMA-based cell-free mMIMO for IoT provides significant performance gain compared with its counterpart deploying conventional orthogonal multiple-access schemes.

How to meet the demand for increasing number of users, higher data rates, and stringent quality-of-service (QoS) in the beyond fifth-generation (B5G) networks? Cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is considered as a promising solution, in which many wireless access points cooperate to jointly serve the users by exploiting coherent signal processing. However, there are still many unsolved practical issues in cell-free massive MIMO systems, whereof scalable massive access implementation is one of the most vital. In this paper, we propose a new framework for structured massive access in cell-free massive MIMO systems, which comprises one initial access algorithm, a partial large-scale fading decoding (P-LSFD) strategy, two pilot assignment schemes, and one fractional power control policy. New closed-form spectral efficiency (SE) expressions with maximum ratio (MR) combining are derived. The simulation results show that our proposed framework provides high SE when using local partial minimum mean-square error (LP-MMSE) and MR combining. Specifically, the proposed initial access algorithm and pilot assignment schemes outperform their corresponding benchmarks, P-LSFD achieves scalability with a negligible performance loss compared to the conventional optimal large-scale fading decoding (LSFD), and scalable fractional power control provides a controllable trade-off between user fairness and the average SE.

Cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) provides more uniform spectral efficiency (SE) for users (UEs) than cellular technology. The main challenge to achieve the benefits of cell-free massive MIMO is to realize signal processing in a scalable way. In this paper, we consider scalable full-pilot zero-forcing (FZF), partial FZF (PFZF), protective weak PFZF (PWPFZF), and local regularized ZF (LRZF) combining by exploiting channel statistics. We derive closed-form expressions of the uplink SE for FZF, PFZF, and PWPFZF combining with large-scale fading decoding over independent Rayleigh fading channels, taking channel estimation errors and pilot contamination into account. Moreover, we investigate the impact of the number of pilot sequences, antennas per AP, and APs on the performance. Numerical results show that LRZF provides the highest SE. However, PWPFZF is preferable when the number of pilot sequences is large and the number of antennas per AP is small. The reason is that PWPFZF has lower computational complexity and the SE expression can be computed in closed-form. Furthermore, we investigate the performance of PWPFZF combining with fractional power control and the numerical results show that it improves the performance of weak UEs and realizes uniformly good service for all UEs in a scalable fashion.

Cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a promising technology for future wireless networks. One main challenge of realizing practical cell-free massive MIMO is the high power consumption and huge hardware cost for employing high-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). To tackle this issue, a promising solution is to use low-resolution ADCs. In this paper, we investigate the cell-free massive MIMO system with low-resolution ADCs over spatially correlated channels. We generalize three levels of receiver cooperation and derive a tight closed-form expression of the spectral efficiency (SE) for a centralized receiver cooperation with large-scale fading decoding as a function of the resolution of ADCs. We also investigate the impact of spatial correlation magnitude on the sum SE. Moreover, we proposed a low-complexity power control method for maximizing the sum SE. Numerical results show that the centralized receiver cooperation needs more quantization bits to achieve the ideal performance and the proposed power control is efficient for improving the system performance.