Chapter 13: Distributed Processing

Learning Objectives

• Distinguish centralized and distributed processing architectures and articulate the tradeoffs in terms of performance, fronthaul load, and computational complexity
• Define the four levels of cooperation (L1–L4) and derive the SINR expression for each
• Derive the optimal large-scale fading decoding (LSFD) weights that maximize per-user SINR
• Formulate the energy efficiency optimization in user-centric cell-free networks
• Characterize fronthaul capacity requirements under scalar and vector quantization
• Evaluate the performance gap between centralized and distributed processing as a function of network parameters
• Identify when each cooperation level provides the best performance-complexity tradeoff