Uplink power control with MMSE receiver in multi-cell MU-massive-MIMO systems

In the current literature considering multi-cell multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MU-Massive-MIMO) systems, equal uplink power allocation among users is typically assumed, which does not exploit the potential of peruser power control. By contrast, in this paper we apply multi-cell uplink power control, assuming the minimum mean-square-error receiver based on the pilot contaminated channel estimation and a very large but finite number of antennas at the base station. We derive the lower bound on the average post-processing uplink signal to interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) with individual power assignment between pilot and data transmissions for each user, which facilitates a joint iterative uplink pilot and data power control strategy that minimizes the sum transmit power of all users subject to the per-user SINR and per-user power constraints. The convergence of the proposed algorithm to a unique fixed point optimal solution is discussed for both single- and multi-user scenarios. Numerical results indicate the significance of uplink power control which further improves the energy efficiency in MU-Massive-MIMO systems.