Pilot design for large-scale multi-cell multiuser MIMO systems

Large-scale multi-cell multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (LS-MIMO) systems can greatly increase the spectral efficiency. But the performance of these systems is deteriorated by pilot contamination. In this paper, first, a pilot design criterion is proposed by exploiting the orthogonality of channel vectors of LS-MIMO systems. Second, following this criterion, Chu sequences based pilots are designed. Because of the proposed pilots, the channel estimate of most terminals of a cell is only interfered by the partial cells rather than all the other cells, where the latter is caused by traditional pilots. As a result, pilot contamination is mitigated. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed pilots.