Cell-Free Massive MIMO for Next-Generation Communication and Sensing Systems

With the significant advancements of wireless communication systems that aim to meet exponentially increasing data rate demands, two promising concepts have appeared: (i) Cell-free massive MIMO, which entails the joint transmission and processing of the signals allowing the removal of classical cell boundaries, and (ii) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), unifying communication and sensing in a single framework. This dissertation aims to take steps toward overcoming the key challenges in each concept and eventually merge them for efficient future communication and sensing networks.Cell-free massive MIMO is a distributed MIMO concept that eliminates classical cell boundaries and provides a robust performance. A significant challenge in realizing the cell-free massive MIMO in practice is its deployment complexity. In particular, connecting its many distributed access points with the central processing unit through wired fronthaul is an expensive and time-consuming approach. To eliminate this problem and enhance scalability, in this dissertation, a cell-free massive MIMO architecture adopting a wireless fronthaul is proposed, and the optimization of achievable rates for the end-to-end system is carried out. The evaluation has shown the strong potential of employing wireless fronthaul in cell-free massive MIMO systems. ISAC merges radar and communication systems, allowing effective sharing of resources, including bandwidth and hardware. The ISAC framework also enables sensing to aid communications, which shows a significant potential in mobile communication applications. Specifically, radar sensing data can address challenges like beamforming overhead and blockages associated with higher frequency, large antenna arrays, and narrow beams. To that end, this dissertation develops radar-aided beamforming and blockage prediction approaches using low-cost radar devices and evaluates them in real-world systems to verify their potential. At the intersection of these two paradigms, the integration of sensing into cell-free massive MIMO systems emerges as an intriguing prospect for future technologies. This integration, however, presents the challenge of considering both sensing and communication objectives within a distributed system. With the motivation of overcoming this challenge, this dissertation investigates diverse beamforming and power allocation solutions. Comprehensive evaluations have shown that the incorporation of sensing objectives into joint beamforming designs offers substantial capabilities for next-generation wireless communication and sensing systems.