Multi-cell massive MIMO transmission with coordinated pilot reuse

In this paper, we propose a coordinated pilot reuse (CPR) approach to reduce the pilot overhead for multi-cell massive multi-input multi-output transmission. Unlike the conventional multi-cell pilot reuse approach in which pilots can only be reused among different cells, the proposed CPR approach allows pilots to be reused among both inter-cell and intra-cell user equipments, and thus, pilot overhead can be efficiently reduced. For spatially correlated Rayleigh fading channels, we first present a CPR-based channel estimation method and a low complexity pilot allocation algorithm. Because CPR might lead to additional pilot interference, we develop a statistically robust uplink receiver and downlink precoder that takes channel estimation errors into account. The proposed uplink receiver and downlink precoder are robust to channel state information inaccuracy, and thus, can guarantee a certain transmission performance. Monte-Carlo simulations illustrate the significant performance improvement in net spectral efficiency offered by the proposed CPR approach.