Large-Scale Fading Precoding for Maximizing the Product of SINRs

Abstract: This paper considers the large-scale fading precoding design for mitigating the pilot contamination in the downlink of multi-cell massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) systems. Rician fading with spatially correlated channels are considered where the line-of-sight (LOS) components of the channels are randomly phase-shifted in each coherence block. The large-scale fading precoding weights are designed based on maximizing the product of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios (SINRs) of the users, which provides a good balance between max-min fairness and sum rate maximization. The spectral efficiency (SE) is derived based on the scaled least squares (LS) estimates of the channels, which only utilize the despreaded pilot signals without any matrix inversion. Simulation results show that the two-layer large-scale fading precoding improves the SE of almost all users compared to the conventional single-layer precoding.