Optimal Pilot Sequence Design for Multi-Cell MIMO-OFDM Systems

In this paper, optimal pilot sequence designs for MIMO-OFDM systems in multi-cell environments are provided. The proposed multi-cell optimality criterion is to minimize the worst-case MSE of an LS-based channel estimator. To satisfy the multi-cell optimality, it is found that the pilot sequence set, having the perfect auto-correlation property, should meet the Welch bound and the maximum magnitude of the cross-correlation function should be further minimized. Multi-cell optimal pilot sequence designs for various pilot types and their DFT representations are proposed by adopting Chu sequences and a tight upper-bound on the maximum size of the pilot sequence set is derived for a given pilot sequence length and the maximum allowed cross-correlation value. Simulation results show that the proposed pilot sequences can improve both the MSE performance and the system performance in multi-cell environments.