227 / 2020-01-03 02:46:00

Semi-blind pilot decontamination based on blind source separation and angular domain discrimination in massive MIMO systems

Angular domain discrimination; blind source separation; massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO); pilot decontamination; spatial channel model; semi-blind

IEEE SAM 2020: Full Regular Papers > Blind source separation and channel identification

This paper addresses the problem of pilot decontamination in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The main contributions of this work can be categorized into three aspects, firstly, the spatial channel model is utilized to investigate the effect of pilot contamination, which is more realistic than idealized Rayleigh fading channels for environment with finite multipath. Secondly, the semi-blind algorithm exploiting both uplink pilots and uplink data is proposed to extract the user groups that reuse the same pilot. Thirdly, the angular domain discrimination method is developed to discriminate the desired channel from interference channels, making it more robust than the amplitude domain discrimination. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed semi-blind approach can effectively reduce the pilot contamination effect and the angular domain discrimination shows superior performance over the amplitude domain discrimination as long as the angular supports of the desired channel and interference channels are not fully overlapped.