Analysis of the pilot contamination effect in very large multicell multiuser MIMO systems for physical channel models

We consider multicell multiuser MIMO systems with a very large number of antennas at the base station. We assume that the channel is estimated by using uplink training sequences, and we consider a physical channel model where the angular domain is separated into a finite number of directions. We analyze the so-called pilot contamination effect discovered in previous work, and show that this effect persists under the finite-dimensional channel model that we consider. We further derive closed-form bounds on the achievable rate of uplink data transmission with maximum-ratio combining, for a finite and an infinite number of base station antennas.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ICASSP
• Authors: Hien Quoc Ngo, Thomas L. Marzetta, Erik G. Larsson
• Keywords: Base Station, Channel Model, ICASSP 2011, Multicell Multiuser Mimo, Signal Processing