Joint pilot sequence design and power control for Max-Min fairness in uplink massive MIMO

This paper optimizes the pilot assignment and pilot transmit powers to mitigate pilot contamination in Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) systems. While prior works have treated pilot assignment as a combinatorial problem, we achieve a more tractable problem formulation by directly optimizing the pilot sequences. To this end, we compute a lower bound on the uplink (UL) spectral efficiency (SE), for Rayleigh fading channels with maximum ratio (MR) detection and arbitrary pilot sequences. We optimize the max-min SE with respect to the pilot sequences and pilot powers, under power budget constraints. This becomes an NP-hard signomial problem, but we propose an efficient algorithm to obtain a local optimum with polynomial complexity. Numerical results manifest the near optimality of the proposed algorithm and show significant gains over existing suboptimal algorithms.