Pilot Reuse Factor with Large Scale Fading Precoding for Massive MIMO

Abstract: The fundamental limitation of massive MIMO technology is pilot contamination effect. This effect occurs during uplink training when terminals use the same orthogonal signals. In this paper, a pilot reuse factor with large scale fading precoding is proposed to mitigate the pilot contamination effect. The pilot reuse factor is designed to assign unique orthogonal signals to the adjacent cells. These unique orthogonal signals are reused only within the cell and hence, intra-pilot contamination is the only concern. Large scale fading precoding is then used to mitigate the intra-pilot contamination effect. The average achievable sum rate is computed for different pilot reuse factors. Experimental results through MATLAB simulation show that a higher pilot reuse factor gives better average achievable sum rates.