Co-channel interference poses a challenge in any wireless communication network where the time-frequency resources are reused over different geographical areas. The interference is particularly diverse in cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) networks, where a large number of user equipments (UEs) are multiplexed by a multitude of access points (APs) on the same time-frequency resources. For realistic and scalable network operation, only the interference from UEs belonging to the same serving cluster of APs can be estimated in real-time and suppressed by precoding/combining. As a result, the unknown interference arising from scheduling variations in neighboring clusters makes the rate adaptation hard and can lead to outages. This paper aims to model the unknown interference power in the uplink of a cell-free massive MIMO network. The results show that the proposed method effectively describes the distribution of the unknown interference power and provides a tool for rate adaptation with guaranteed target outage.

翻译：同信道干扰在任何时频资源在不同地理区域复用的无线通信网络中都是一项挑战。在无蜂窝大规模多输入多输出（MIMO）网络中，干扰尤为多样化：大量用户设备（UE）由多个接入点（AP）在相同时频资源上复用。为了实现真实且可扩展的网络运营，仅能实时估计并通过预编码/合并抑制来自同一AP服务集群内UE的干扰。因此，由相邻集群调度变化引起的未知干扰导致速率自适应困难，并可能引发中断。本文旨在对无蜂窝大规模MIMO网络上行链路中的未知干扰功率进行建模。结果表明，所提出的方法有效描述了未知干扰功率的分布，并为具有保证目标中断概率的速率自适应提供了工具。