Iterative interference cancellation based channel estimation for multi-cell massive MIMO systems

Massive MIMO technique is expected to greatly improve spectrum efficiency as well as energy efficiency of a communication system. However, to obtain the benefits, the system needs to get the ideal channel state information (CSI). In practice, however, a pilot-based channel estimation scheme needs to be applied to obtain the CSI, which may cause a serious pilot contamination problem for multi-cell massive MIMO systems. To deal with this issue, an Iterative Interference Cancellation based MMSE Channel Estimation Algorithm is proposed in this paper, by iteratively eliminating the inter-cell interference. Compared to conventional channel estimation algorithms, the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the channel estimation accuracy of a target cell with low computational complexity. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed algorithm.