Pilot signal design for coordinated transmission in massive MIMO systems

Massive multi-input multi-output (m-MIMO) and coordinated multipoint transmission (CoMP) are quite feasible techniques to improve the spectral efficiency in next generation wireless communication systems. It is of great concern to accurately estimate channel state information (CSI) of all base stations (BSs) involved in CoMP. Muting may be applied to improve the CSI estimation, which can reduce inter-cell interference during the estimation. However, it may require large resource for pilot signaling as the number of BSs in CoMP increases. When a m-MIMO technology is employed, it may require very large resource for pilot signaling. In this paper, we design the pilot signal for m-MIMO transmission with CoMP. The proposed scheme can improve CSI estimation, increasing the overall spectral efficiency of edge users. The performance of proposed scheme is verified by computer simulation.