Location-Aided Pilot Contamination Elimination for Massive MIMO Systems

Paper in proceedings, 2015

Massive MIMO systems, while being a promising technology for 5G systems, face a number of practical challenges. Among those, pilot contamination stands out as a key bottleneck to design high-capacity beamforming methods. We propose and analyze a location-aided approach to reduce the pilot contamination effect in uplink channel estimation for massive MIMO systems. The proposed method exploits the location of user terminals, scatterers, and base stations. The approach removes the need for direct estimation of large covariance matrices and provides good channel estimation performance in the large antenna regime.