Breaking Out of the Cell with a Massively Distributed Network

Cellular network topologies have so far dominated the wireless communication industry, but there are fundamental limits to a cell-based topology. Even with massive MIMO, which allowed for re-using the same time/frequency resource to serve users, cellular networks tend to suffer from cell-edge issues and inter-cell interference. Cell-free massive MIMO promises a user-centric network, providing ubiquitous coverage and high throughput everywhere and has so far caught the industry’s eyes as one of the major building blocks for 6G. But at what cost? In this talk, we will introduce the ideas behind cell-free massive MIMO and some of the challenges that a cell-free network comes with.