Analysis of Pilot Decontamination Based on Power Control

A subspace method for channel estimation is proposed for asymmetric antenna array systems. The so-called pilot contamination problem reported in [1] is found to be due to the linearity of channel estimation in [2]. We show that it does not occur in cellular systems with power control and power-controlled handoff when the nonlinear channel estimation method proposed in this paper is used. Power-control hand-off is needed to guarantee separability between signal and interference subspaces. We derive the transmission conditions for subspace separability based on free probability and perturbation theory.