Joint Power Allocation and Dynamic Cluster Selection in Cell-Free Wireless Networks

Cell-free wireless networks have gained the interest of the research community in recent years due to their potential to provide good quality of service (QoS) to all users. However, this comes at the cost of complex signal processing and high computational demands from the network to actively suppress inter-user interference. In this paper, we undertake joint optimization of the uplink power and the dynamic clusters in a cell-free wireless network to achieve spectral efficiency targets for users in a scalable and efficient manner. To this end, we re-purpose a classic iterative algorithm and theoretically prove its convergence to our objectives. We introduce various base station (BS) subset selection schemes and study their performance, establishing a trade-off between the performance and computational cost of the algorithm while facilitating a distributed operation. The numerical results convey the favorable impact of allowing variable cluster size in a system that employs maximal ratio combining (MRC).