Pilot Reuse for Massive MIMO Transmission over Spatially Correlated Rayleigh Fading Channels

Abstract

We propose pilot reuse (PR) in single cell for massive multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission to reduce the pilot overhead. For spatially correlated Rayleigh fading channels, we establish a relationship between channel spatial correlations and channel power angle spectrum when the base station antenna number tends to infinity. With this channel model, we show that sum mean square error (MSE) of channel estimation can be minimized provided that channel angle of arrival intervals of the user terminals reusing the pilots are non-overlapping, which shows feasibility of PR over spatially correlated massive MIMO channels with constrained channel angular spreads. Regarding that channel estimation performance might degrade due to PR, we also develop the closed-form robust multiuser uplink receiver and downlink precoder that minimize sum MSE of signal detection, and reveal a duality between them. Subsequently, we investigate pilot scheduling, which determines the PR pattern, under two minimum MSE related criteria, and propose a low complexity pilot scheduling algorithm which relies on the channel statistics only. Simulation results show that the proposed PR scheme provides significant performance gains over the conventional orthogonal training scheme in terms of net spectral efficiency.