Pilot Decontamination with Pilot Scheduling for 5G Communications

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is projected as the most favorable technology among the latest for quality cellular services in fifth-generation wireless networks. This technology has been extensively studied for analyzing its advantages and bottlenecks. One of the main bottlenecks of massive MIMO that has come forward is the pilot contamination that is caused by the interference of signals sent by the users using similar pilots. The studies done in this regard have considered the inter-cell interference occurring due to pilot reuse and have successfully eliminated the same. In this paper, the pilot contamination taking place due to pilot reuse within the same cell in the uplink direction is taken into consideration. An efficient greedy algorithm has been proposed in this regard which greedily finds the user combinations with less interference using their channel coefficients and assigns them the pilots efficiently. Numerical results prove the efficacy of the algorithm in the context of eliminating the restraining effects of pilot contamination on system throughput in intra-cellular environment. Moreover, the proposed scheme proves to be superior to some of the existing schemes in this domain.