RIS-assisted Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems With Two-Timescale Design and Hardware Impairments

Abstract: Integrating the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) into a cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) system is an effective solution to achieve high system capacity with low cost and power consumption. However, existing works of RIS-assisted systems mostly assumed perfect hardware, while the impact of hardware impairments (HWIs) is generally ignored. In this paper, we consider the general Rician fading channel and uplink transmission of the RIS-assisted CF-mMIMO system under transceiver impairments and RIS phase noise. To reduce the feedback overhead and power consumption, we propose a two-timescale transmission scheme to optimize the passive beamformers at RISs with statistical channel state information (CSI), while transmit beamformers at access points (APs) are designed based on instantaneous CSI. Also, the maximum ratio combining (MRC) detection is applied to the central processing unit (CPU). On this basis, we derive the closed-form approximate expression of the achievable rate, based on which the impact of HWIs and the power scaling laws are analyzed to draw useful theoretical insights. To maximize the users' sum rate or minimum rate, we first transform our rate expression into a tractable form, and then optimize the phase shifts of RISs based on an accelerated gradient ascent method. Finally, numerical results are presented to demonstrate the correctness of our derived expressions and validate the previous analysis, which provide some guidelines for the practical application of the imperfect RISs in the CF-mMIMO with transceiver HWIs.