On Superimposed Pilot for Channel Estimation in Multicell Multiuser MIMO Uplink: Large System Analysis

This paper concerns the uplink of multicell multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. To tackle the effect of pilot contamination that is generally viewed as a bottleneck in previous work, this paper presents a superimposed pilot (SP)-aided uplink channel estimation scheme and mathematically characterizes the impact that an SP has on the performance of such a very large MIMO system. It is shown that there are two types of interference components that do not vanish, even when the number of antennas M grows to infinity. The first type, which is referred to as cross-contamination, is due to the correlation between the SP and data among different cells. The second type, which is referred to as self-contamination, is due to the dependence between channel estimation and estimation error. Cross-contamination is, in principle, similar to pilot contamination in a conventional pilot-based multicell MIMO system, whereas self-contamination is unique for the SP-aided scheme. Both theoretical and simulation results demonstrate that the SP-aided scheme can effectively reduce the estimation contamination by increasing the data frame size and, in turn, achieve a significant improvement over the spectral efficiency, in comparison with conventional pilot-based methods.