Reduction of Pilot Contamination with Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Massive MIMO Systems

Abstract

To estimate the channel in a time division duplex (TDD) mode of a large-scale multi cell system in the uplink, a maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is proposed for reduction of pilot contamination problem and compared with the traditional estimators; least squares (LS) and minimum mean square error (MMSE). An i.i.d Rayleigh channel model is considered for the fast fading channels. Simulations have been performed in MATLAB with Monte-Carlo Simulations to observe that the proposed estimator MLE performs better than the traditional channel estimators for complex systems.