User experience in mobile communications is vulnerable to worse quality at the cell edge, which cannot be compensated by enjoying excellent service at the cell center, according to the principle of risk aversion in behavioral economics. Constrained by weak signal strength and substantial inter-cell interference, the cell edge is always a major bottleneck of any mobile network. Due to their possibility for empowering the next-generation mobile system, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and cell-free massive MIMO (CFmMIMO) have recently attracted a lot of focus from academia and industry. In addition to a variety of technological advantages, both are highly potential to boost cell-edge performance. To the authors' best knowledge, a performance comparison of RIS and CFmMIMO, especially on the cell edge, is still missing in the literature. To fill this gap, this paper establishes a fair scenario and demonstrates extensive numerical results to clarify their behaviors at the cell edge.

翻译：根据行为经济学中的风险规避原则，移动通信中的用户体验在小区边缘易受质量劣化影响，而小区中心的优质服务无法弥补这一缺陷。受限于弱信号强度和严重的跨小区干扰，小区边缘始终是任何移动网络的主要瓶颈。由于赋能下一代移动系统的潜力，可重构智能表面（RIS）和无小区大规模MIMO（CFmMIMO）近期引起了学术界和工业界的广泛关注。除多种技术优势外，两者在提升小区边缘性能方面均具有巨大潜力。据作者所知，现有文献中仍缺乏RIS与CFmMIMO的性能对比研究，特别是在小区边缘场景下的对比。为填补这一空白，本文构建了公平的对比场景，并通过大量数值仿真结果揭示两者在小区边缘的行为特性。