  Imagine a coverage area with many wireless access points that cooperate to
jointly serve the users, instead of creating autonomous cells. Such a cell-free
network operation can potentially resolve many of the interference issues that
appear in current cellular networks. This ambition was previously called
Network MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) and has recently reappeared under
the name Cell-Free Massive MIMO. The main challenge is to achieve the benefits
of cell-free operation in a practically feasible way, with computational
complexity and fronthaul requirements that are scalable to large networks with
many users. We propose a new framework for scalable Cell-Free Massive MIMO
systems by exploiting the dynamic cooperation cluster concept from the Network
MIMO literature. We provide a novel algorithm for joint initial access, pilot
assignment, and cluster formation that is proved to be scalable. Moreover, we
adapt the standard channel estimation, precoding, and combining methods to
become scalable. A new uplink and downlink duality is proved and used to
heuristically design the precoding vectors on the basis of the combining
vectors. Interestingly, the proposed scalable precoding and combining
outperform conventional maximum ratio processing and also performs closely to
the best unscalable alternatives.
