Distributed Pilot Assignment for Distributed Massive-MIMO Networks

TL;DR: Results of extensive numerical simulations establish that the proposed scheme out-performs existing centralized and distributed schemes in terms of mitigating pilot contamination and significantly enhancing network throughput.

Abstract: Pilot contamination is a critical issue in distributed massive MIMO networks, where the reuse of pilot sequences due to limited availability of orthogonal pilots for channel estimation leads to performance degradation. In this work, we propose a novel distributed pilot assignment scheme to effectively mitigate the impact of pilot contamination. Our proposed scheme not only has low convergence time, but it also enhances overall system performance with low signaling overhead. Results of extensive numerical simulations establish that the proposed scheme out-performs existing centralized and distributed schemes in terms of mitigating pilot contamination and significantly enhancing network throughput.