An Efficient Pilot Assignment Scheme for Addressing Pilot Contamination in Multicell Massive MIMO Systems

Abstract

The reuse of the same pilot group across cells to address bandwidth limitations in a network has resulted in pilot contamination. This causes severe inter-cell interference at the targeted cell. Pilot contamination is associated with multicell massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems which degrades the system performance even when extra arrays of antennas are added to the network. In this paper, we propose an efficient pilot assignment (EPA) scheme to address this issue by maximizing the minimum uplink rate of the target cell’s users. To achieve this, we exploit the large-scale characteristics of the fading channel to minimize the amount of outgoing inter-cell interference at the target cell. Results from the simulation show that the EPA scheme outperforms both the conventional and the smart pilot assignment (SPA) schemes by reducing the effect of inter-cell interference. These results, show that the EPA scheme has significantly improved the system performance in terms of achievable uplink rate and cumulative distribution function (CDF) for both signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), and uplink rate.