A Pilot Assignment Scheme for Multi-cell Massive MIMO System

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) can boost the spectrum and energy efficiency for the next generation wireless communication systems. However, pilot contamination severely degrades the performance of massive MIMO systems. In this paper, we propose a location-aware pilot reuse scheme to mitigate the pilot contamination problem. It uses the approximate locations of mobile devices to provide good estimates of the channel statistics between the mobile devices and their corresponding base stations. Specifically, we aim at improving the fairness of interference for different cells. The pilots in the first cell are assigned to users randomly. As for the other cells, the mutual interference will be taken into consideration. Simulation results are provided to validate the algorithm. It can enhance the quality of the channel estimation for all users and the fairness for different cells.