On Reusing Pilots Among Interfering Cells in Massive MIMO

Pilot contamination, caused by the reuse of pilots among interfering cells, remains as a significant obstacle that limits the performance of massive multi-input multi-output antenna systems. To handle this problem, less aggressive reuse of pilots involving allocation of additional pilots for interfering users is closely examined in this paper. Hierarchical pilot reuse methods are proposed, which effectively mitigate pilot contamination and increase the net throughput of the system. Among the suggested hierarchical pilot reuse schemes, the optimal way of assigning pilots to different users is obtained in a closed-form solution which maximizes the net sum-rate in a given coherence time. Simulation results confirm that when the ratio of the channel coherence time to the number of users in each cell is sufficiently large, less aggressive reuse of pilots yields significant performance advantage relative to the case where all cells reuse the same pilot set.