Optimal Pilot and Payload Power Control in Single-Cell Massive MIMO Systems

Abstract: This paper considers the jointly optimal pilot and data power allocation in single-cell uplink massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Using the spectral efficiency (SE) as performance metric and setting a total energy budget per coherence interval, the power control is formulated as optimization problems for two different objective functions: the weighted minimum SE among the users and the weighted sum SE. A closed form solution for the optimal length of the pilot sequence is derived. The optimal power control policy for the former problem is found by solving a simple equation with a single variable. Utilizing the special structure arising from imperfect channel estimation, a convex reformulation is found to solve the latter problem to global optimality in polynomial time. The gain of the optimal joint power control is theoretically justified, and is proved to be large in the low SNR regime. Simulation results also show the advantage of optimizing the power control over both pilot and data power, as compared to the cases of using full power and of only optimizing the data powers as done in previous work.