Massive MIMO Transmission with Pilot Reuse in Single Cell

We propose pilot reuse (PR) in single cell for massive multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission to reduce the pilot overhead. For the spatially correlated Rayleigh fading channels, we establish a relationship between the channel spatial correlations and the channel power angle spectrum when the base station antenna number tends to infinity. With this channel model, we first show that the sum mean square error of the channel estimation (MSE-CE) can be minimized if the channel angle of arrival intervals of the user terminals reusing the pilots are non-overlapping, which shows the feasibility of PR in massive MIMO channels with constrained channel angular spreads. Then we design the pilot scheduler under the minimum MSE-CE criterion. With the channel estimation error due to PR taken into account, we also develop the closed-form robust uplink receiver and downlink precoder that minimize the sum MSE of the signal detection. Simulation results show that the proposed PR scheme provides significant performance gains over the conventional orthogonal training scheme in terms of the net spectral efficiency.