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This paper concerns the uplink of multicell multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. To tackle the effect of pilot contamination that is generally viewed as a bottleneck in previous work, this paper presents a superimposed pilot (SP)-aided uplink channel estimation scheme and mathematically characterizes the impact that an SP has on the performance of such a very large MIMO system. It is shown that there are two types of interference components that do not vanish, even when the number of antennas $M$ grows to infinity. The first type, which is referred to as cross-contamination, is due to the correlation between the SP and data among different cells. The second type, which is referred to as self-contamination, is due to the dependence between channel estimation and estimation error. Cross-contamination is, in principle, similar to pilot contamination in a conventional pilot-based multicell MIMO system, whereas self-contamination is unique for the SP-aided scheme. Both theoretical and simulation results demonstrate that the SP-aided scheme can effectively reduce the estimation contamination by increasing the data frame size and, in turn, achieve a significant improvement over the spectral efficiency, in comparison with conventional pilot-based methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In multi-user multiple-input–multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems that employ pilot-symbol aided channel estimation, the pilot-to-data power ratio (PDPR) has a large impact on the system performance. In this paper, we consider the problem of setting the PDPR in multi-cell MU-MIMO systems in the presence of channel estimation errors, intercell interference and pilot contamination. To analyze and address this problem, we first develop a model of the multi-cell MU-MIMO system and derive a closed-form expression for the mean squared error of the uplink received data symbols. Building on this result, we then propose two decentralized PDPR-setting algorithms based on game theoretic approaches that are applicable in multi-cell systems. We find that both algorithms converge to a Nash equilibrium and provide performance improvements over systems that do not properly set the PDPR, while they maintain different levels of fairness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For large-scale antenna array multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, a typical solution often put forward for uplink detection consists in applying low-complexity linear receivers such as zero-forcing (ZF) and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) combiners. In this paper, the performance of uplink MMSE detection has been analyzed in the context of a multi-cell multiuser MIMO system. An approximate expression for the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) is proposed, which is in simple form and becomes exact in the low SNR regime. This approximate SINR applies to systems where the base station (BS) has the statistical information of the out-of-cell interfering signals, and systems where the BS ignores the presence of such interfering signals. This approximate SINR is tight for arbitrary user powers, arbitrary number of antennas at the base station, and arbitrary channel correlation matrix associated with any particular user. Approximate expressions for capacity and bit-error rate/symbol-error rate have also been derived. Particularly, it can be proven that, when the MMSE receiver ignores the presence of out-of-cell interfering signals, the performance gap between ZF and MMSE vanishes in the high SNR regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a flexible pilot assignment method to jointly optimize the uplink and downlink data transmission in multi-cell Massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems with correlated Rayleigh fading channels. By utilizing a closed-form expression of the ergodic spectral efficiency (SE) achieved with maximum ratio processing, we formulate an optimization problem for maximizing the minimum weighted sum of the uplink and downlink SEs subject to the transmit powers and pilot assignment sets. This combinatiorial optimization problem is solved by two sequential algorithms: a heuristic pilot assignment is first proposed to obtain a good pilot reuse set and the data power control is then implemented. Numerical results manifest that the proposed algorithm converges fast to a better minimum sum SE per user than the algorithms in previous works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different from the existing works, in this paper we investigate the pilot allocation in multi-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, aiming to maximize the spectral efficiency (SE) subject to the constraint that the number of user equipments (UEs) satisfying the quality of service (QoS) is maximized. Since the considered bilevel optimization problem that is tough to handle, we resort to the greedy algorithms with low computational complexity. We propose a QoS constrained (QC) pilot allocation scheme, which sequentially allocates the pilot sequence having large interference power to the UE with small signal power so that the number of UEs satisfying QoS can be maximized and then the SE can also be maximized. Simulation results show that the propose QC scheme outperforms the conventional scheme and smart pilot allocation (SPA) scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, the serious pilot contamination problem severely restricts its ability to boost the spectrum utilization. To tackle this problem, the conventional concept of softly reusing the spectrum resources for the inner regions of the neighboring cells has been extended to reuse the pilot resources so as to accommodate more users. Alternatively, properly selecting the users to reuse the pilots among the neighboring cells can alleviate the pilot contamination problem as well. In this paper, we delicately integrate these two concepts to properly reuse the pilots allocated to the outer regions of the cells. By well designing the hazard- and secure-edge regions to manage the pilot reuse, the increment of interference can be effectively suppressed, and, consequently, the more accommodated users can contribute to the remarkably higher sum data rates. Furthermore, via some adaptive power adjustment for the users within different regions, the user data rates can further be significantly enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the performance of large-scale MIMO network where the base station has a large number of antennas and performs semi-blind channel estimation. We show that one can increase the number of antennas at the user side without increasing the overhead imposed by the channel estimation linearly with the number of user antennas. Specifically, we propose a simple data-aided channel estimation scheme which exploits the quasi-orthogonality of the channel vectors and takes advantage of the conventional pilot-aided channel estimation performed for the first antenna at each user. Two schemes are then analyzed using the extra antenna(s) at the users: data-multiplexing and interference alignment. We obtain achievable rates for the proposed uplink multi-cell MIMO system in both schemes. The rate bounds are tight and the system performance is also analyzed in terms of the outage probability to study the effect of the data length used for channel estimation scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the heterogeneous cellular network (HetNet) where the macrocell base stations (MBSs) are equipped with very large antenna arrays. Since such a combined massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) and HetNet system operates in the co-channel time-division duplex mode, to mitigate the pilot contamination effect to channel estimation, the number of users that can be served simultaneously is limited by the available pilot resources in the conventional designs. We propose a pilot reuse scheme for massive MIMO–HetNet to increase the user capacity. Specifically, location-aware channel estimation is employed at the MBSs to mitigate the severe pilot contamination introduced by pilot reuse, and we propose a novel pilot assignment algorithm to reduce the interference in HetNets. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme can support more users and increase both the uplink and the downlink sum-rate capacity, in comparison to the conventional scheme, particularly when the antenna number at the MBSs is sufficiently large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we investigate the power allocation needed to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of a massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system. We first derive a closed-form expression for the user rate with the presence of pilot contamination caused by inter-cell interference during the channel estimation phase. From the definition of system EE, we propose a maximization problem with two constraints: limited power for pilot and data signals and a minimum value for every user rate. The proposed maximization problem is a fractional programming problem and is very hard to solve directly. Therefore, we propose the first iterative algorithm to transform the original problem into subtractive form. Moreover, we propose the second iterative algorithm to solve the subtractive form maximization problem by approximating it as a convex problem. The convergence and feasibility of the two proposed algorithms are also discussed. Finally, the effectiveness of our scheme is shown by simulation results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The limited fronthaul capacity imposes a challenge on the uplink of a centralized radio access network (C-RAN). We propose to boost the fronthaul capacity of a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-aided C-RAN by globally optimizing the power sharing between channel estimation and data transmission both for the user devices (UDs) and the remote radio units (RRUs). Intuitively, allocating more power to the channel estimation will result in more accurate channel estimates, which increases the achievable throughput. However, increasing the power allocated to the pilot training will reduce the power assigned to data transmission, which reduces the achievable throughput. In order to optimize the powers allocated to the pilot training and to the data transmission of both the UDs and the RRUs, we assign an individual power sharing factor to each of them and derive an asymptotic closed-form expression of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio for the massive MIMO-aided C-RAN consisting of both the UD-to-RRU links and the RRU-to-baseband unit (BBU) links. We then exploit the C-RAN architecture's central computing and control capability for jointly optimizing the UDs’ power sharing factors and the RRUs’ power sharing factors aiming at maximizing the fronthaul capacity. Our simulation results show that the fronthaul capacity is significantly boosted by the proposed global optimization of the power allocation between channel estimation and data transmission both for the UDs and for their host RRUs. As a specific example of 32 receive antennas (RAs) deployed by the RRU and 128 RAs deployed by the BBU, the sum rate of 10 UDs achieved with the optimal power sharing factors improves by 33% compared with the one attained without optimizing power sharing factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a location-aware pilot allocation algorithm for a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) network with high-mobility users, where the wireless channels are subject to Rician fading. Pilot allocation in massive MIMO is a hard combinatorial problem and depends on the locations of users. As such, it is highly complex to achieve the optimal pilot allocation in real-time for a network with high-mobility users. Against this background, we propose a low-complexity pilot allocation algorithm, which exploits the behavior of line-of-sight (LOS) interference among the users and allocate the same pilot sequence to the users with small LOS interference. Our examination demonstrates that our proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the existing algorithms, even with localization errors. Specifically, for the system considered in this work, our proposed algorithm provides up to 37.26% improvement in sum spectral efficiency (SE) and improves the sum SE of the worst interference-affected users by up to 2.57 bits/sec/Hz, as compared to the existing algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]