RIS-assisted cell-free massive MIMO systems with reflection area: AP number reduction

Cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has been regarded as a promising technology due to high spectral efficiency. However, as large number of access points (APs) are deployed with fibers connecting to the central processing unit, the increase of energy consumption and hardware cost raise concerns. The reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) with impressing potential for low energy and cost finds a way to solve this problem. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the cell-free massive MIMO system with a RIS. As RIS can only reflect signals from the front, user equipments (UEs) and APs are divided into two categories according to their relative position with the RIS, i.e., one is on the reflection area of the RIS and the other is not. A closed-form approximation of the UE achievable downlink rate is derived. Based on it, we obtain the optimal RIS position and phase shift that can maximize the UE sum rate, through alternating optimization method. It is found that compared with the cell-free massive MIMO system without RIS, to achieve the same rate performance, the number of required AP in the RIS-assisted system can be significantly reduced. Moreover, as the RIS component increases, the number of required AP can be reduced almost linearly without rate reduction, which means the hardware and energy cost can be greatly cut down. Furthermore, from our simulation results, we can see that when users are densely distributed, the optimal location of the RIS should be closer to users. When users are uniformly distributed, the optimal position of RIS is close to the central position. (C) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.