RRH based Massive MIMO with "on the Fly" Pilot Contamination Control

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel coded pilot scheme for dense Massive MIMO systems with RRHs, enabling on-the-fly pilot collision detection and significantly reducing pilot contamination, thus enhancing multiplexing gains.

Contribution

It introduces a new coded pilot approach that allows RRHs to detect pilot collisions, improving pilot reuse efficiency in dense Massive MIMO deployments.

Findings

Substantial reduction in pilot contamination.

Increased multiplexing gain per pilot dimension.

Enhanced densification benefits over conventional schemes.

Abstract

Dense large-scale antenna deployments are one of the most promising technologies for delivering very large throughputs per unit area in the downlink (DL) of cellular networks. We consider such a dense deployment involving a distributed system formed by multi-antenna remote radio head (RRH) units connected to the same fronthaul serving a geographical area. Knowledge of the DL channel between each active user and its nearby RRH antennas is most efficiently obtained at the RRHs via reciprocity based training, that is, by estimating a user's channel using uplink (UL) pilots transmitted by the user, and exploiting the UL/DL channel reciprocity. We consider aggressive pilot reuse across an RRH system, whereby a single pilot dimension is simultaneously assigned to multiple active users. We introduce a novel coded pilot approach, which allows each RRH unit to detect pilot collisions, i.e., when more than a single user in its proximity uses the same pilot dimensions. Thanks to the proposed coded pilot approach, pilot contamination can be substantially avoided. As shown, such strategy can yield densification benefits in the form of increased multiplexing gain per UL pilot dimension with respect to conventional reuse schemes and some recent approaches assigning pseudorandom pilot vectors to the active users.