Graph Coloring Based Pilot Allocation to Mitigate Pilot Contamination for Multi-Cell Massive MIMO Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a graph coloring based pilot allocation scheme to reduce pilot contamination in multi-cell massive MIMO systems, leveraging interference graphs and large-scale fading characteristics to improve system performance.

Contribution

It proposes a novel GC-PA scheme that efficiently allocates pilots using interference graphs, addressing pilot contamination in massive MIMO systems.

Findings

Significant reduction in pilot contamination demonstrated through simulations

Improved system capacity and interference management

Effective pilot resource utilization in multi-cell scenarios

Abstract

A massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, which utilizes a large number of base station (BS) antennas to serve a set of users, suffers from pilot contamination due to the inter-cell interference (ICI). In this letter, a graph coloring based pilot allocation (GC-PA) scheme is proposed to mitigate pilot contamination for multi-cell massive MIMO systems. Specifically, by exploiting the large-scale characteristics of fading channels, an interference graph is firstly constructed to describe the potential ICI relationship of all users. Then, with the limited pilot resource, the proposed GC-PA scheme aims to mitigate the potential ICI by efficiently allocating pilots among users in the interference graph. The performance gain of the proposed scheme is verified by simulations.