Abstract-In this paper, we propose a relative channel estimation error (RCEE) metric, and derive closed-form expressions for its expectation Exp rcee and the achievable uplink rate holding for any number of base station antennas M , with the least squares (LS) and minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimation methods. It is found that RCEE and Exp rcee converge to the same constant value when M → ∞, which renders the pilot power allocation (PPA) substantially simplified and a PPA algorithm is proposed to minimize the average Exp rcee per user with a total pilot power budget P in multi-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output systems. Numerical results show that the PPA algorithm brings considerable gains for the LS estimation compared with equal PPA (EPPA), while the gains are significant only with large frequency reuse factor (FRF) for the MMSE estimation. Moreover, for large FRF and large P , the performance of the LS approaches to the MMSE. Besides, a scheduling strategy is proposed to allocate pilot power whole system, which can approach the optimal performance. For the achievable uplink rate, the PPA scheme delivers almost the same average achievable uplink rate and improves the minimum achievable uplink rate compared with the EPPA scheme.Index Terms-Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MI-MO), pilot power allocation, relative channel estimation error, achievable uplink rate.