Linear Programming Based Pilot Allocation in TDD Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Systems

By providing substantial gains in terms of both spectral and energy-efficiency, Massive MIMO is expected to be the promising enabler for the fifth generation (5G) communications. However the performance of massive MIMO is greatly affected by pilot contamination due to the insufficiency of pilot sequences. To overcome this, we propose a linear programming based pilot allocation with the purpose of alleviating the effect of pilot contamination and maximizing the system throughput. We first formulate the pilot allocation as a user clustering problem, which can be converted to a linear programming one by introducing the integer factor and constraint relaxation. An efficient linear programming algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the other candidates in the presence of pilot contamination.