Distributed Joint Beamforming for RIS-assisted Cell-Free MIMO with Discrete Phase Shifts

Abstract Both reconfiurable intelligent surface (RIS) and cell-free multiple-input multiple-output (CF-MIMO) system are holding promise to become the predominant research direction in 6G networks. This paper studies the problem of weighted sum-rate maximization(WSR) in RIS-assisted CF-MIMO networks with discrete phase shifts. We utilize alternating optimization (AO) to iteratively calculate active and passive beamforming. At access points (APs) side, we employ a distributed algorithm to design the active beamforming, leveraging information interact among APs without centralized designing at central processing unit(CPU). Facing the constraint of discrete phase shift in RIS, we adopt semidefinite relaxation(SDR) projection and proximal gradient descent(PGD) to design the passive beamforming respectively. Simulation results indicate that our proposed algorithms achieve performance comparable to the distributed framework with continuous phase shift while reducing the computational time.