Pilot Contamination Elimination in Massive MIMO Systems with an Improved Time-Shifted Scheme

Pilot contamination can bring up a grave impairment in the performance of massive multiple-input multiple-output(MIMO) systems. In this paper, an improved time-shifted pilot scheme is proposed to reduce the pilot contamination, where orthogonal pilots are employed in the same group to eliminate the residual intra-group interference existing in the original time-shifted pilot scheme. Meanwhile, the rigorous closed-form expressions of both downlink and uplink transmission rates with a finite number of antennas are derived, and it is shown that the intra-group interference can be completely eliminated by the proposed scheme. Simulation results demonstrate that both downlink and uplink transmission rates are significantly improved by employing the proposed scheme.