Cell-free Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is a promising distributed network architecture for 5G-and-beyond systems. It guarantees ubiquitous coverage at high spectral efficiency (SE) by leveraging signal co-processing at multiple access points (APs), aggressive spatial user multiplexing and extraordinary macro-diversity gain. In this study, we propose two distributed precoding schemes, referred to as local partial zero-forcing (PZF) and local protective partial zero-forcing (PPZF), that further improve the spectral efficiency by providing an adaptable trade-off between interference cancelation and boosting of the desired signal, with no additional front-hauling overhead, and implementable by APs with very few antennas. We derive closed-form expressions for the achievable SE under the assumption of independent Rayleigh fading channel, channel estimation error and pilot contamination. PZF and PPZF can substantially outperform maximum ratio transmission and zero-forcing, and their performance is comparable to that achieved by regularized zero-forcing (RZF), which is a benchmark in the downlink. Importantly, these closed-form expressions can be employed to devise optimal (long-term) power control strategies that are also suitable for RZF, whose closed-form expression for the SE is not available.

We consider transmission of system information in a cell-free massive MIMO system, when the transmitting access points do not have any channel state information and the receiving terminal has to estimate the channel based on downlink pilots. We analyze the system performance in terms of outage rate and coverage probability and use space-time block codes to increase performance. We propose a heuristic method for pilot/data power optimization that can be applied without any channel state information at the access points. We also analyze the problem of grouping the access points, which is needed when the single-antenna access points jointly transmit a space-time block code.

We consider transmission of system information in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). This information needs to be reliably delivered to inactive users in the cell without any channel state information at the base station. Downlink transmission entails the use of downlink pilots and a special type of precoding that aims to reduce the dimension of the downlink channel and the pilot overhead, which would otherwise scale with the number of base station antennas. We consider a scenario in which the base station transmits over a small number of coherence intervals, providing little time/frequency diversity. The system information is transmitted with orthogonal space-time block codes to increase reliability and performance is measured using outage rates. Several different codes are compared, both for spatially correlated and uncorrelated channels and for varying amounts of time/frequency diversity. We show that a massive MIMO base station can outperform a single-antenna base station in all considered scenarios.

We present a method for jamming a time-division duplex link using a transceiver with a large number of antennas. By utilizing beamforming, a jammer with M antennas can degrade the spectral efficiency of the primary link more than conventional omnidirectional jammers under the same power constraint, or perform equally well with approximately 1/M of the output power. The jammer operates without any prior knowledge of channels to the legitimate transmitters, or the legitimate signals by relying on channel reciprocity.