Pilot Contamination Elimination for Large-Scale Multiple-Antenna Aided OFDM Systems

Abstract

Pilot contamination constitutes a particularly significant impairment in large-scale multi-cell systems. We propose an effective pilot contamination elimination scheme for multi-cell time division duplexing based orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems, by carefully designing a sophisticated amalgam of downlink (DL) training and ‘scheduled’ uplink (UL) training. During the DL training stage, each base station (BS) transmits the DL pilot symbols (PSs) to its mobile stations (MSs) for them to estimate their frequency-domain channel transfer functions (FDCHTFs), which are then embedded in the UL PSs by ‘predistorting’ the PSs with the estimated FDCHTFs. During the scheduled UL training, each BS's UL receiver in turn extracts the FDCHTFs of its MSs from their received PSs by eliminating the pilot contamination imposed by the simultaneously transmitted UL PSs of all other cells. Our simulation results demonstrate that the pilot contamination is completely eliminated by the proposed scheme, even for the network consisting of a large number of unity frequency reuse cells. Most significantly, unlike many existing pilot contamination reduction schemes, our scheme does not rely on the assumption that each BS knows the second-order statistics of all the interfering UL channels.