Uplink Hardware Impairments in OFDM-Based Cell-Free Massive MIMO With Impaired Wireless Fronthaul
Abstract
This paper studies the uplink performance of OFDM-based cell-free massive MIMO systems in the presence of hardware impairments affecting both low-cost access points and wireless fronthaul transceivers. We consider a centralized architecture with functional split option~8, where the sampled baseband signals are forwarded from the access points to the central processing unit through wireless fronthaul links operating at mmWave or sub-THz frequencies. A unified analytical framework is developed to characterize the aggregate impact of hardware distortions across the access and fronthaul links. In particular, closed-form expressions are derived for channel estimation and uplink spectral efficiency under hardware-impaired transmission and reception. To mitigate the resulting performance degradation, distortion-aware linear receive combining is considered for the wireless fronthaul. Moreover, a max-min fair resource allocation framework is developed to jointly optimize the uplink transmit powers, fronthaul transmit powers, and fronthaul time expansion factor.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{demir2026uplink,
title = {{Uplink Hardware Impairments in OFDM-Based Cell-Free Massive MIMO With Impaired Wireless Fronthaul}},
author = {Özlem Tuğfe Demir},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.26148},
eprint = {2609.26148},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26148},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Uplink Hardware Impairments in OFDM-Based Cell-Free Massive MIMO With Impaired Wireless Fronthaul
AU - Özlem Tuğfe Demir
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.26148
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26148
AB - This paper studies the uplink performance of OFDM-based cell-free massive MIMO systems in the presence of hardware impairments affecting both low-cost access points and wireless fronthaul transceivers. We consider a centralized architecture with functional split option~8, where the sampled baseband signals are forwarded from the access points to the central processing unit through wireless fronthaul links operating at mmWave or sub-THz frequencies. A unified analytical framework is developed to characterize the aggregate impact of hardware distortions across the access and fronthaul links. In particular, closed-form expressions are derived for channel estimation and uplink spectral efficiency under hardware-impaired transmission and reception. To mitigate the resulting performance degradation, distortion-aware linear receive combining is considered for the wireless fronthaul. Moreover, a max-min fair resource allocation framework is developed to jointly optimize the uplink transmit powers, fronthaul transmit powers, and fronthaul time expansion factor.
ER -