MDD-Enabled Two-Tier Terahertz Fronthaul in Indoor Industrial Cell-Free Massive MIMO

To liberate indoor industrial cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) networks from wired fronthaul, this paper proposes a multicarrier-division duplex (MDD)-enabled two-tier terahertz (THz) fronthaul scheme. In our scheme, two layers of fronthaul links rely on the mutually orthogonal subcarrier sets in the same THz band, while access links are implemented over sub-6G band. However, the proposed scheme leads to a complicated mixed-integer nonconvex optimization problem incorporating access point (AP) clustering, device selection, the assignment of subcarrier sets and the resource allocation at both the central processing unit (CPU) and APs. Hence, in order to address the formulated problem, we first resort to the low-complexity but efficient heuristic methods thereby relaxing the involved binary variables. Then, the overall end-to-end optimization is implemented by iteratively optimizing the assignment of subcarrier sets and the number of AP clusters. Furthermore, an advanced MDD frame structure consisting of three parallel data streams is tailored for the proposed scheme. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed dynamic AP clustering approach in dealing with the networks of varying sizes. Moreover, benefiting from the well-designed frame structure, MDD is capable of outperforming TDD in the two-tier fronthaul networks. Additionally, the effect of the THz bandwidth on system performance is analyzed, and it is shown that empowered by sufficient bandwidth, our proposed two-tier fully-wireless fronthaul scheme can achieve a comparable performance to the fiber-optic based systems. Finally, the superiority of the proposed MDD-enabled fronthaul scheme is verified in a practical scenario with realistic ray-tracing simulations.