Arithmetic/Geometric Progression Based Pilot Allocation With Antenna Scheduling for Massive MIMO Cellular Systems

Pilot contamination in massive MIMO cellular network is a major hindrance for achieving desired system throughput. To address this, an efficient algorithm is developed to assign each of the available pilot sequences to a user or multiple users, where the number of users assigned to different pilots follow arithmetic or geometric progression. The effects of intra-cell interference, small scale fading, and uncorrelated noise along with inter-cell interference are taken into analysis of proposed algorithm. With finite base station antennas and multiple antennas at user terminals, antenna scheduling is applied to allocate the best-suited antenna to each user and pilot.