Abstract
User experience in mobile communications is vulnerable to worse quality
at the cell edge, which cannot be compensated by enjoying excellent
service at the cell center, according to the principle of risk aversion
in behavioral economics. Constrained by weak signal strength and
substantial inter-cell interference, the cell edge is always a major
bottleneck of any mobile network. Due to their possibility for
empowering the next-generation mobile system, reconfigurable intelligent
surface (RIS) and cell-free massive MIMO (CFmMIMO) have recently
attracted a lot of focus from academia and industry. In addition to a
variety of technological advantages, both are highly potential to boost
cell-edge performance. To the authors’ best knowledge, a performance
comparison of RIS and CFmMIMO, especially on the cell edge, is still
missing in the literature. To fill this gap, this paper establishes a
fair scenario and demonstrates extensive numerical results to clarify
their behaviors at the cell edge.