Introduction
As noted by Saad et al. [1], the prevalence of portable devices, social networks, Internet–of–Things (IoT), and other emerging applications has exploded in recent years and continues to grow at
a breakneck pace.
Primarily, cellular massive multiple–input multiple–output (mMIMO) network has evolved over the years to support the explosive increase of wireless data traffic.
However, one of the foremost limitations inherent in conventional cellular mMIMO systems is the dramatic spectral efficiency (SE) degradation owing to large quality–of–service (QoS)
variations and inter–cell interference.
Cell–free (CF) mMIMO has emerged as an innovative networking paradigm to alleviate the cell–edge performance issues, achieve substantive increment in SE, and guarantee continuous evolution