Interference Reduction in Multi-Cell Massive MIMO Systems I: Large-Scale Fading Precoding and Decoding

A wireless massive MIMO system entails a large number (tens or hundreds) of base station antennas serving a much smaller number of users, with large gains in spectralefficiency and energy-efficiency compared with conventional MIMO technology. Until recently it was believed that in multicellular massive MIMO system, even in the asymptotic regime, as the number of service antennas tends to infinity, the performance is limited by directed inter-cellular interference. This interference results from unavoidable re-use of reverse-link training sequences (pilot contamination) by users in different cells. We devise a new concept that leads to the effective elimination of inter-cell interference in massive MIMO systems. This is achieved by outer multi-cellular precoding, which we call LargeScale Fading Precoding (LSFP). The main idea of LSFP is that each base station linearly combines messages aimed to users from different cells that re-use the same training sequence. Crucially, the combining coefficients depend only on the slowfading coefficients between the users and the base stations. Each base station independently transmits its LSFP-combined symbols using conventional linear precoding that is based on estimated fast-fading coefficients. Further, we derive estimates for downlink and uplink SINRs and capacity lower bounds for the case of massive MIMO systems with LSFP and a finite number of base station antennas.