Impacts of Asynchronous Reception on Cell-Free Distributed Massive MIMO Systems

Multiple remote antenna units (RAUs) cooperate to serve a certain user in cell-free distributed massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Due to the different distances between each RAU and the user, asynchronous reception effects will occur. This paper studies the impacts of asynchronous reception effects on cell-free distributed massive MIMO systems. We first derive the minimum-mean-square error (MMSE) channel estimation under the asynchronous reception effects. Given the estimated channel state information, we derive the closed-form expressions of the user achievable rates with maximum ratio transmission (MRT) and regularized zero-forcing (RZF) precoders, which are further used to analyze the impacts of asynchronous reception effects. The accuracy of the closedform expressions are verified. Simulation results demonstrate that asynchronous reception effects cause a non-negligible drop on the system spectral efficiency. Moreover, the performance degradation is proportional to the subcarrier sequence number and even more serious with the increasing of SNR or the number of antennas per RAU.