On massive MIMO performance with semi-orthogonal pilot-assisted channel estimation

With the rapidly increasing demand for high-speed data transmission and a growing number of terminals, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has been shown promising to meet the challenges owing to its high spectrum efficiency. Although massive MIMO can efficiently improve the system performance, usage of orthogonal pilots and growing terminals causes large resource consumption especially when the coherence interval is short. This paper proposes a semi-orthogonal pilot design with simultaneous data and pilot transmission. In the proposed technique, we exploit the asymptotic channel orthogonality in massive MIMO systems, with which a successive interference cancellation (SIC)-based channel estimation is applied to mitigate the mutual interference between data and pilot. We derived the theoretical expressions of the achievable rates in massive MIMO systems with our proposed pilot design. Further discussion on performance verifies the superiority of our proposed pilot design for high or low signal-to-noise-ratios (SNRs) with any coherence interval length. And simulation results show that the proposed pilot design can achieve a significant performance improvement with reduced pilot resource consumption compared with the conventional orthogonal pilots.