A Successive Optimization Approach to Pilot Design for Multi-Cell Massive MIMO Systems

In this letter, we introduce a novel pilot design approach that minimizes the total mean square errors of the minimum mean square error estimators of all base stations (BSs) subject to the transmit power constraints of individual users in the network, while tackling the pilot contamination in multi-cell massive MIMO systems. First, we decompose the original non-convex problem into distributed optimization sub-problems at individual BSs, where each BS can optimize its own pilot signals given the knowledge of pilot signals from the remaining BSs. We then introduce a successive optimization approach to transform each optimization sub-problem into a linear matrix inequality form, which is convex and can be solved by available optimization packages. Simulation results confirm the fast convergence of the proposed approach and prevails a benchmark scheme in terms of providing higher accuracy.