Abstract
As a promising candidate for high-mobility communications, orthogonal chirp division multiplexing (OCDM) has attracted growing attention owing to its robustness to Doppler shifts and efficient hardware implementation. In this paper, motivated by the urgent demand for seamless and reliable communications in high-speed railway (HSR) scenarios, we innovatively integrate OCDM into cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CFmMIMO) systems and establish a novel transmission framework, termed CFmMIMO-OCDM. Within this framework, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the doubly-dispersive HSR channel model and derive the input-output signal relation in HSR communications. Moreover, to address the challenges posed by high computational complexity and excessive data exchange inherent in centralized signal processing, we first reveal the quasi-sparsity of the Fresnel-domain channel matrix in HSR communications. Then, we develop a distributed baseband processing (DBP) architecture by leveraging the channel sparsity. Aimed at enhancing the signal detection efficiency and accuracy, we further design a distributed message passing (DMP)-based detection algorithm for CFmMIMO-OCDM in HSR communications, which achieves considerably reduced complexity and data exchange compared to the centralized detection. Numerical results confirm the superiority of CFmMIMO-OCDM over conventional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-assisted CFmMIMO systems in HSR communications. Moreover, theoretical analysis and numerical results are provided to demonstrate that our proposed DMP detection can achieve attractive bit error rate (BER) and complexity performance compared to conventional centralized detection.