An Analytical Reliability Performance Assessment of Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems for 5G and Beyond Cellular Networks

N today‟s realm, the 5G cellular networks offer a new era of fully digital environment by connecting people anywhere anytime. This era requires inspiring demands to the networks in terms of spectral and energy efficiencies, low-latency and ultra-reliable communications. A major development to deal with these unparalleled demands is the introduction of Cell- Free Massive MIMO (CF mMIMO) systems to the cellular network. In recent years, mathematical foundations have been laid for a CF mMIMO communication system to evaluate the spectral and energy efficiencies given the number of access points. Various existing literatures have adopted mathematical models to formulate closed-form expressions for these efficiencies using uncorrelated Rayleigh fading for simple linear processing detectors. In this paper, we try to address a compelling and interesting question which has not received much attention lately. The question is how to evaluate the reliability of a connected user terminal in both a CF mMIMO and conventional mMIMO system? We answer this question by first analyzing the signal models for both systems assuming exact channel estimates and consider an uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channel model. The exact Bit Error Rate, as a reliability assessment, in closed-form are then derived based on strong mathematical foundations, which are simple to numerically evaluate in Matlab R2022, for MPSK and MQAM modulation schemes. The mathematical models presented in this work can be used in 5G and Beyond 5G networks to evaluate the distributions of error rates for a user given the number of Access points or Base Station antennas and modulation scheme. Machine Learning algorithms can be applied to the analytical expressions with a view to predict the error performance of a user terminal given the fading characteristic of the propagation environment