Fog Massive MIMO with On-the-Fly Pilot Contamination Control

Abstract

This paper considers a new architecture underpinned by on-the-fly pilot contamination control, termed Fog massive MIMO, where the users are able to establish high-throughput and low-latency data links in a seamless and opportunistic manner, as they travel through a dense fog of high capacity Remote Radio Heads (RRHs). Utilizing some recent results on unique coverage in Boolean models, we analyze the spectral efficiency and outage probability of the proposed architecture via stochastic geometry. Our analysis, supported by extensive system simulation, reveals that there exists a “sweet spot” of the per-pilot user load (number of users per pilot), such that the proposed system achieves spectral efficiency close to that of the ideal cellular massive MIMO baseline, while exhibiting the simplicity and low-latency of completely user-centric operations.