Max-Min Fair Wireless-Powered Cell-Free Massive MIMO for Uncorrelated Rician Fading Channels

This paper considers cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output systems where the multiple-antenna access points (APs) assist the single-antenna user equipments (UEs) by wireless power transfer. The UEs utilize the energy harvested in the downlink to transmit uplink pilot and information signals to the APs. We consider practical Rician fading with the line-of-sight components of the channels being phase-shifted in each coherence block. The uplink spectral efficiency (SE) is derived for this model and the max-min fairness problem is considered where the optimization variables are the AP and UE power control coefficients together with the large-scale fading decoding vectors. The objective is to maximize the minimum SE of the users under APs' and UEs' transmission power constraints. An alternating optimization algorithm is proposed for the solution of the highly-coupled non-convex problem.