Performance Analysis of Massive MIMO for Cell-Boundary Users

In this paper, we consider massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems for both downlink and uplink scenarios, where three radio units (RUs) connected via one digital unit (DU) support multiple user equipments (UEs) at the cell-boundary through the same radio resource, i.e., the same time-frequency slot. For downlink transmitter options, the study considers zero-forcing (ZF) and maximum ratio transmission (MRT), while for uplink receiver options it considers ZF and maximum ratio combining (MRC). For the sum rate of each of these, we derive simple closed-form formulas. In the simple but practically relevant case where uniform power is allocated to all downlink data streams, we observe that, for the downlink, vector normalization is better for ZF while matrix normalization is better for MRT. For a given antenna and user configuration, we also derive analytically the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) level below which MRC should be used instead of ZF. Numerical simulations confirm our analytical results.