On the Performance of Distributed Antenna Array Systems With Quasi-Orthogonal Pilots

In this paper, we address the problem of channel estimation in a single cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) system with distributed antenna arrays (DAA) under the availability of limited pilots. Specifically, we propose to use pilots that are not only orthogonal within a cluster but also minimally correlated across clusters. We show that pilot sets that form mutually unbiased orthonormal bases (MUOB) minimize both inter- and intra-cluster pilot contamination. This also allows us to optimally choose the number of pilots needed to serve a given number of user equipments (UEs) within a DAA-mMIMO system. Following this, we develop an access point (AP) centered UE clustering algorithm to optimally cluster UEs for MUOB pilot allocation. Our experiments reveal that in a DAA-mMIMO system, MUOB not only offers better fairness compared to the traditional orthogonal pilot reuse scheme in terms of channel estimation error and per-UE throughput, but also delivers a higher sum system throughput.