Pilot Contamination Precoding in Multi-Cell Large Scale Antenna Systems

An LSAS entails a large number (tens or hundreds) of base station antennas serving a much smaller number of terminals, with large gains in spectral-efficiency and energy-efficiency compared with conventional MIMO technology. Until recently it was believed that in multi-cellular LSAS, even in the asymptotic regime, as the number of service antennas tends to infinity, the performance is limited by directed inter-cellular interference. The interference results from unavoidable re-use of reverse-link pilot sequences (pilot contamination) by terminals in different cells. We devise a new concept that leads to the effective elimination of inter-cell interference in TDD LSAS systems. This is achieved by outer multi-cellular pre-coding, which we call pilot contamination pre-coding (PCP). The main idea of PCP is that each base station linearly combines messages aimed to terminals from different cells that re-use the same pilot sequence. Crucially, the combining coefficients depend only on the slow-fading coefficients between the terminals and the base stations. Each base station independently transmits its PCP-combined symbols using conventional linear pre-coding that is based on estimated fast-fading coefficients. Further we derive estimates for SINRs and a capacity lower bound for the case of LSASs with PCP and finite number of antennas M.