Uplink Cell-Free Massive MIMO OFDM with Phase Noise-Aware Channel Estimation: Separate and Shared Local Oscillators

Journal article, 2026

Cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) networks enhance coverage and spectral efficiency (SE) by distributing antennas across access points (APs) with phase coherence between APs. However, the use of cost-efficient local oscillators (LOs) introduces phase noise (PN) that compromises phase coherence, even with centralized processing. Sharing an LO across APs can reduce costs in specific configurations but cause correlated PN between APs, leading to correlated interference that affects centralized combining. This can be improved by exploiting the PN correlation in channel estimation. This paper presents an uplink orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal model for PN-impaired cell-free mMIMO, addressing gaps in single-carrier signal models. We evaluate mismatches from applying single-carrier methods to OFDM systems, showing how they underestimate the impact of PN and produce over-optimistic achievable SE predictions. Based on our OFDM signal model, we propose two PN-aware channel and common phase error estimators: a distributed estimator for uncorrelated PN wit<h separate LOs and a centralized estimator with shared LOs. We introduce a deep learning-based channel estimator to enhance the performance and reduce the number of iterations of the centralized estimator. The simulation results show that the distributed estimator outperforms mismatched estimators with separate LOs, whereas the centralized estimator enhances distributed estimators with shared LOs.