Pilot Design and Allocation for Multi-Cell Massive MIMO Systems With Two-Tier Receiving.

This paper investigates pilot design and allocation in multi-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output systems with two-tier receiving. As the length of pilot is limited, the pilots cannot be orthogonal and cause interference. The sum rate as well as the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of the system are firstly analyzed. The sum rate upper bound and the asymptotic SINR are derived. The analysis shows that the pilot correlation and the spatial correlation jointly affect the sum rate. Based on this observation, the discrete Fourier transform vectors are employed in designing pilots with various correlation values. Then, with the channel correlation information and the designed pilots, the pilots are allocated to the cells in a greedy way with the object of maximizing the sum rate upper bound. Moreover, the sum rate analysis, the pilot design, and the pilot allocation are extended to the scenario with grouped correlations. Simulation results show that the proposed pilot design and allocation performs better than other pilots and the derived upper bound is effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]