Cooperative Scheduling for Pilot Reuse in Massive MIMO Systems

To be differentiated from the literature, in this paper, we aim to alleviate the impact of pilot contamination (PC) on the massive MIMO systems by cooperatively scheduling users (rather than just assigning) among neighboring cells to share the limited orthogonal pilots. To this end, we develop the multi-cell cooperative scheduling (MCCS) algorithm together with the cooperative scheduling indexes (COSIs) for maximizing the data rate, maximizing the Jain's fairness index and reaching a better tradeoff in-between. For convenience, they are denoted by the COSIs for the CMDR, CMMF and CPF schedulers, respectively. However, its high computational complexity may somehow resists its from practical applications. Thus, a low-complexity cooperative proportional fairness (LC-CPF) algorithm is designed to well approach the MCCS algorithm using the CPF COSI; and at the meantime, the order of computational complexity can be significantly reduced. Moreover, its ability to reach a better tradeoff can still be maintained under the impact of high spectrum-sharing interference. In addition, it is interesting to find that using the proposed cooperative scheduling methods, the open-loop power control mechanism is no longer required for compensating the differences of received signal quality between users.