Channel Coherence Classification with Frame-Shifting in Massive MIMO Systems

This paper considers the uplink pilot overhead in a time division duplexing (TDD) massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) mobile systems. A common scenario of conventional massive MIMO systems is a Base Station (BS) serving all user terminals (UTs) in the cell with the same TDD frame format that fits the coherence interval of the worst-case scenario of user mobility (e.g. a moving train with velocity 300 Km/s). Furthermore, the BS has to estimate all the channels each time-slot for all users even for those with long coherence intervals. In fact, within the same cell, sensors or pedestrian with low mobility UTs (e.g. moving 1.38 m/s) share the same short TDD frame and thus are obliged to upload their pilots each time-slot. The channel coherence interval of the pedestrian UTs with a carrier frequency of 1.9 GHz can be as long as 60 times that of the train passenger users. In other words, conventional techniques waste 59-uploaded pilot sequences for channel estimation. In this paper, we are aware of the resources waste due to various coherence intervals among different user mobility. We classify users based on their coherence interval length, and we propose to skip uploading pilots of UTs with large coherence intervals. Then, we shift frames with the same pilot reused sequence toward an empty pilot time-slot. Simulation results had proved that the proposed technique overcome the performance of conventional massive MIMO systems in both energy and spectral efficiency.