Semi-Blind Signal Detection for Uplink Massive MIMO With Channel Sparsity

This paper considers the transceiver design for uplink massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems with channel sparsity. Recent progress has shown that sparsity learning-based blind signal detection is able to retrieve the channel and data by using message passing based noisy matrix factorization. We propose a semi-blind signal detection scheme in which a short pilot sequence is introduced to each user packet and the knowledge of pilots is integrated into the message passing algorithm for noisy matrix factorization. We show that our semi-blind signal detection scheme substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art blind detection and training-based schemes in the short-pilot regime.