Dynamic Resource Allocation in Co-Located and Cell-Free Massive MIMO

In this paper, we study joint power control and scheduling in uplink massive multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) systems with randomly arriving data traffic. We consider both co-located and Cell-Free (CF) Massive MIMO, where the difference lies in whether the antennas are co-located at the base station or spread over a wide network area. The data is generated at each user according to an individual stochastic process. Using Lyapunov optimization techniques, we develop a dynamic scheduling algorithm (DSA), which decides at each time slot the amount of data to admit to the transmission queues and the transmission rates over the wireless channel. The proposed algorithm optimizes the long-term user throughput under various fairness policies while keeping the transmission queues stable. Simulation results show that the state-of-the-art power control schemes developed for Massive MIMO with infinite backlogs can fail to stabilize the system even when the data arrival rates are within the network capacity region. Our proposed DSA shows advantage in providing finite delay with performance optimization whenever the network can be stabilized.