Optimal Power Control for Superimposed Pilots in Uplink Massive MIMO Systems

In Massive MIMO, the pilot contamination effect reduces the spectral efficiency (SE) gains and superimposed pilot (SP) transmission has been proposed to mitigate this effect. SP is based on transmitting pilot and data symbols simultaneously to allow for longer pilots and no pilot overhead. This work studies the optimal power control strategies in the uplink of a Massive MIMO system with SP and detection based on maximum ratio combining. The optimization objectives are maximum product of SINRs and max-min fairness, and these problems are reformulated as geometric programs which allow for efficient implementations. The numerical results indicate that the SE gains from the optimal power control with respect to the heuristic statistical channel inversion power control, are more significant when the interference from pilot symbols is subtracted before data detection.