Cell-Free SUCRe Protocol: A User-Centric Adaptation

The motivation of this paper is to introduce a cell-free adaptation of the strongest-user collision resolution (SUCRe) protocol originally proposed for cellular massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) networks. Our goal with this adaptation is to show that a cell-free network can better handle the access attempts of users' equipment (UEs) due to the augmented macro-diversity brought by the disposition of access points (APs) over the coverage area. Moreover, we aim to introduce a cell-free version of the protocol that follows the so-called user-centric perspective, meaning that the protocol is scalable from the point of view of computational complexity and the increase in the number of antennas and UEs in the system.