Low‐overhead constant envelope precoding in multi‐cell massive MIMO systems with pilot contamination

Abstract

The authors consider downlink transmission in a multi‐cell massive multiple‐input and multiple‐output (MIMO) system and focus on decreasing the feedback overhead caused by cell cooperation in constant envelope precoding (CEP). In the literature, the single‐cell case for CEP with perfect channel state information (CSI) has been studied. Here, considering full cooperation among the cells, they develop CEP for the multi‐cell case. They devise a low overhead centralised construction for CEP which employs limited cooperation among the cells, providing higher system throughput. To achieve the minimum feedback overhead, a distributed realisation of CEP is proposed where each cell locally performs CEP. Furthermore, a new optimisation problem is solved to compensate for the effects of pilot contamination. In addition, to reduce the computational complexity, a relaxed iterative form is presented for the limited cooperation and the distributed scenarios. Numerical results show that in the proposed structures, despite a tremendous decrease in the system overhead, the performance confronts merely an insignificant degradation, <10%, compared to the full‐cooperation case. Moreover, in the presence of imperfect CSI, the performance of the distributed structure whose imperfect CSI is compensated for, approaches the performance of this structure in the perfect CSI scenario.