Energy Efficiency Maximization in Large-Scale Cell-Free Massive MIMO: A Projected Gradient Approach

This paper considers the fundamental power allocation problem in cell-free massive mutiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems which aims at maximizing the total energy efficiency (EE) under a sum power constraint at each access point (AP) and a quality-of-service (QoS) constraint at each user. Existing solutions for this optimization problem are based on solving a sequence of second-order cone programs (SOCPs), whose computational complexity scales dramatically with the network size. Therefore, they are not implementable for practical large-scale cell-free massive MIMO systems. To tackle this issue, we propose an iterative power control algorithm based on the frame work of an accelerated projected gradient (APG) method. In particular, each iteration of the proposed method is done by simple closed-form expressions, where a penalty method is applied to bring constraints into the objective in the form of penalty functions. Finally, the convergence of the proposed algorithm is analytically proved and numerically compared to the known solution based on SOCP. Simulations results demonstrate that our proposed power control algorithm can achieve the same EE as the existing SOCPs-based method, but more importantly, its run time is much lower (one to two orders of magnitude reduction in run time, compared to the SOCPs-based approaches). Index Terms Cell-free massive MIMO, energy efficiency, accelerated projected gradient.