Energy-efficient mmWave cell-free massive MIMO downlink transmission with low-resolution DACs and phase shifters

The mmWave cell-free massive MIMO (CFmMIMO), combining the advantages of wide bandwidth in the mmWave frequency band and the high- and uniform-spectral efficiency of CFmMIMO, has recently emerged as one of the enabling technologies for 6G. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for energy-efficient mmWave CFmMIMO systems that uses low-resolution digital-analog converters (DACs) and phase shifters (PSs) to introduce low-complexity hybrid precoding. Additionally, we propose a heuristic pilot allocation scheme that makes the best effort to slash some interference from copilot users. The simulation results show that the proposed hybrid precoding and pilot allocation scheme outperforms the existing schemes. Furthermore, we reveal the relationship between the energy and spectral efficiencies for the proposed mmWave CFmMIMO system by modeling the whole network power consumption and observe that the introduction of low-resolution DACs and PSs is effective in increasing the energy efficiency by compromising the spectral efficiency and the network power consumption.