Title: Enhancing data rate efficiency in multi-cell massive MIMO systems through pilot resource allocation

Authors: Satyasis Mishra; Betelhem Zerihun Gudina; Demissie Jobir Gelmecha; Davinder Singh Rathee; Bijay Kumar Paikaray

Addresses: Department of ECE, Centurion University of Technology and Management, Odisha, India ' Department of ECE, Adama Science and Technology University, Adama, Ethiopia ' Department of ECE, Adama Science and Technology University, Adama, Ethiopia ' Department of ECE, Adama Science and Technology University, Adama, Ethiopia ' Centre for Data Science, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Siksha 'O' Anusandhan (Deemed to be) University, Odisha, India

Abstract: Pilot contamination (PC) limits the system's performance and highly reduces the data rates. To overcome this problem and improve the data rate of a multi-cell massive MIMO system, a modified soft pilot reuse (mSPR) is proposed. For clustered users, mSPR assigns the same pilot set to low PC severity centre zone users, reusing them in a grouped cell. Centre zone users are randomly assigned pilots from the same group, with the maximum user serving as the pilot reference for orthogonal allocation. The simulation result shows the data rate improvement of the multi-cell multi-user massive MIMO system with the proposed mSPR pilot resource allocation. The number of orthogonal pilots is reduced, improving the achievable uplink rate and spectral efficiency over pre-existing schemes. With different numbers of base station antennas and transmission power, the proposed mSPR pilot resource allocation scheme provides average data rates of 3.5 bps/Hz and 2.78 bps/Hz, respectively.

Keywords: pilot contamination; massive MIMO; modified soft pilot reuse; mSPR; time-division duplex.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBRA.2025.148126

International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications, 2025 Vol.21 No.4, pp.351 - 376

Received: 20 Sep 2023
Accepted: 24 Nov 2023
Published online: 26 Aug 2025 *

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