Pilot Sequence Assignment for Spatially Correlated Massive MIMO Circumstances

Abstract

For massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) circumstances with time division duplex (TDD) protocol, pilot contamination becomes one of main system performance bottlenecks. This paper proposes an uplink pilot sequence assignment to alleviate this problem for spatially correlated massive MIMO circumstances. Firstly, a single-cell TDD massive MIMO model with multiple terminals in the cell is established. Then a spatial correlation between two channel response vectors is established by the large-scale fading variables and the angle of arrival (AOA) span with an infinite number of base station (BS) antennas. With this spatially correlated channel model, the expression for the achievable system capacity is derived. To optimize the achievable system capacity, a problem regarding uplink pilot assignment is proposed. In view of the exponential complexity of the exhaustive search approach, a pilot assignment algorithm corresponding to the distinct channel AOA intervals is proposed to approach the optimization solution. In addition, simulation results prove that the main pilot assignment algorithm in this paper can obtain a noticeable performance gain with limited BS antennas.