Blind Pilot Decontamination

By Ralf Reiner Müller, Laura Cottatellucci, Mikko Vehkaperä. IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 2013

486 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A subspace projection to improve channel estimation in massive multi-antenna systems is proposed and analyzed. Together with power-controlled hand-off, it can mitigate the pilot contamination problem without the need for coordination among cells. The proposed method is blind in the sense that it does not require pilot data to find the appropriate subspace. It is based on the theory of large random matrices that predicts that the eigenvalue spectra of large sample covariance matrices can asymptotically decompose into disjoint bulks as the matrix size grows large. Random matrix and free probability theory are utilized to predict under which system parameters such a bulk decomposition takes place. Simulation results are provided to confirm that the proposed method outperforms conventional linear channel estimation if bulk separation occurs.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7a2838b3b0ad06db5df35e844cd76266319cf424

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In Computer Networks and Communications

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

An Overview of Massive MIMO: Benefits and Challenges (2014, background): “In [76], [77], a blind pilot decontamination scheme is proposed for systems with a power-controlled handoff strategy, and this scheme can separate the interference subspace from the desired signal subspace, resulting in no pilot contamination.”
Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO Communication for Future Wireless Systems: A Survey (2018, unknown): “include: protocol-based methods [22], [41], [193], [194], blind methods [42], [196], [197], precoding-based methods [36], [39], [123], [195], and angle of arrival (AoA)-based methods [38], [198], [199], etc.”
Massive MIMO for next generation wireless systems (2013, background): “While this argument has been contested recently [15], at least under some specific assumptions on the power control used, it appears likely that pilot contamination must be dealt with in some way.”
5G roadmap: 10 key enabling technologies (2016, unknown): “ot waveforms in channel estimation [101] .”
6G Wireless Systems: Vision, Requirements, Challenges, Insights, and Opportunities (2020, background): “Promising research efforts in this area include the adaptation of the pilot signal spacing in time and frequency domains, exploitation of limited angular spread of the channel [77], and advanced signal processing methods for reduction of pilot contamination [78].”
Massive MIMO Systems for 5G and beyond Networks—Overview, Recent Trends, Challenges, and Future Research Direction (2020, methodology): “Pilot based Estimation [58,59], Subspace based Estimation [60], Pilot Reuse [61], Partial Sounding Resource [62], Pilot Contamination Precoding [63], Blind Pilot Decontamination [64,65], Pilot Decontamination [69], Distributed Non-Orthogonal Pilot Design [70].”
Massive MIMO for Maximal Spectral Efficiency: How Many Users and Pilots Should Be Allocated? (2014, background): “This so-called pilot contamination limits the quality of the acquired CSI and the ability to reject inter-cell interference (unless intricate subspace methods can be used for decontamination, as suggested in [17]).”
Downlink Training Techniques for FDD Massive MIMO Systems: Open-Loop and Closed-Loop Training With Memory (2013, background): “Some works that mitigate pilot contamination have been proposed recently [8], [9].”