Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces-Enabled Intra-Cell Pilot Reuse in Massive MIMO Systems

Channel state information (CSI) estimation is a critical issue in the design of modern massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) networks. With the increasing number of users, assigning orthogonal pilots to everyone incurs a large overhead that strongly penalizes the spectral efficiency (SE) of the system. It becomes thus necessary to reuse pilots, giving rise to pilot contamination, a vital performance bottleneck of mMIMO networks. Reusing pilots among the users of the same cell is a very desirable operation condition from the perspective of reducing training overheads; however, the intra-cell pilot contamination might become even worse due to the users’ proximity. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), which are capable of smartly controlling the wireless channel, can be leveraged to achieve intra-cell pilot reuse. In this paper, our main contribution is an RIS-aided approach for intra-cell pilot reuse and the corresponding channel estimation method. Relying upon the knowledge of only statistical CSI, we then optimize the RIS phase-shifts based on a manifold optimization framework and the RIS positioning based on a deterministic approach. The extensive numerical results highlight the remarkable performance improvements achieved by the proposed scheme (for both uplink and downlink transmissions) compared to other alternatives.