Graph Coloring Based Pilot Assignment for Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems.

An efficient pilot assignment scheme based on graph coloring is proposed to mitigate the severe pilot contamination effect in cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output systems. By exploiting the large-scale fading coefficients between the access points (APs) and the user equipments, we first utilize an AP selection algorithm to construct an interference graph. Then, the optimal pilot assignment can be achieved by updating the interference graph. In addition, we consider a fair policy for pilot reuse to improve the system performance. Numerical results verify that, compared with conventional pilot assignment schemes, the proposed graph coloring based pilot assignment scheme can significantly increase the 95 $\%$ -likely per-user throughput and reduce the complexity of assigning pilot sequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]