Review of Pilot Contamination Reduction Methods in Massive MIMO Systems

Massive MIMO system is one of the advanced and attractive technologies for fifth generation of wireless networks. In such systems, base stations employ a very large number of antennas (Hundreds or even thousands of antennas). As a result, in these systems, capacity, spectral efficiency and energy efficiency increases in comparison with conventional MIMO systems. In the channel estimation, interference, which is produced by reuse of the same pilot sequences by different users of neighboring cells, is the most important factor in the performance limits. This phenomenon is referred to as pilot contamination. In this paper, pilot contamination is described and then the research works presented by the researchers on this topic has summarized. We categorize the different proposed mitigation techniques for pilot contamination using the following taxonomy: protocol-based methods, precoding methods, AOA-based methods, blind methods and smart pilot assignment methods. Finally, we propose a method based on smart pilot allocation, to reduce pilot contamination. Simulation results show that both uplink rate of user’s increases based on the proposed method and the accuracy of channel estimation improved greatly than exciting methods. Then we propose a method based on pilot precoding and protocol based allocation to reducing pilot contamination effects. In addition, we study a range of challenges and future research topics.