Pilot-decontamination in massive MIMO systems via network pilot-data alignment

We propose a pilot decontamination method for noncooperative cellular massive MIMO systems using pilot and data alignment in the time-frequency plane. In this method, pilot and data channels are assigned such that the terminals in any two adjacent cells operate over non-overlapping pilot channels but the terminals may share data channels. The former condition is imposed to circumvent pilot contamination in order to boost the performance of cell-edge terminals and the latter condition is put to enhance the cell-average capacity. The pilot-data channel assignment is blindly done with respect to the channel state information of the terminals. Simulation results, using Marzetta's cellular setup, show significant network capacity gains over the conventional methods at virtually no additional cost.