  This work proposes a joint power control and access points (APs) scheduling
algorithm for uplink cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output
(CF-mMIMO) networks without channel hardening assumption. Extensive studies
have done on the joint optimization problem assuming the channel hardening.
However, it has been reported that the channel hardening may not be validated
in some CF-mMIMO environments. In particular, the existing Use-and-then-Forget
(UatF) bound based on the channel hardening often seriously underestimates user
rates in CF-mMIMO. Therefore, a new performance evaluation technique without
resorting to the channel hardening is indispensable for accurate performance
estimations. Motivated by this, we propose a new bound on the achievable rate
of uplink CF-mMIMO. It is demonstrated that the proposed bound provides a more
accurate performance estimate of CF-mMIMO than that of the existing UatF bound.
The proposed bound also enables us to develop a joint power control and APs
scheduling algorithm targeting at both improving fairness and reducing the
resource between APs and a central processing unit (CPU). We conduct extensive
performance evaluations and comparisons for systems designed with the proposed
and existing algorithms. The comparisons show that a considerable performance
improvement is achievable with the proposed algorithm even at reduced resource
between APs and CPU.
