Fronthaul-Efficient Cell-Free Massive MIMO via Stream-Adaptive Resolution Control

Abstract

We consider the uplink of a fronthaul-constrained cell-free massive MIMO system with a single multi-antenna user equipment (UE) transmitting multiple spatial streams to distributed access points (APs). Due to heterogeneous channel conditions and limited fronthaul capacity, uniform-resolution quantization across APs and streams is highly inefficient. To address this, we propose a stream- and AP-adaptive resolution control framework that jointly optimizes the transmit power and per-AP per-stream quantization resolutions. By leveraging a distributed implementation of singular-value decomposition (SVD)-based processing, the data streams are decoupled at the APs, enabling flexible fronthaul compression across both spatial streams and APs. The resulting non-convex optimization problem is tackled using a weighted minimum mean-squared error (WMMSE)-based block coordinate descent algorithm with semi-closed-form updates.