Data-Aided Channel Estimation in Large Antenna Systems

• Published in: IEEE transactions on signal processing Vol. 62; no. 12; pp. 3111 - 3124
• Main Authors: Ma, Junjie, Ping, Li
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 15.06.2014; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Antennas; Applied sciences; Channel estimation; Contamination; Correlation; Covariance matrices; Data-aided channel estimation; Detection, estimation, filtering, equalization, prediction; Estimation error; Exact sciences and technology; Information, signal and communications theory; Interference; iterative channel estimation and signal detection; large antenna system; massive MIMO system; pilot contamination; Signal and communications theory; Signal, noise; Telecommunications and information theory; MIMO system; Estimation error; pilot contamination; Parameter estimation; Transmission channel; Data transmission; Iterative method; large antenna system; Signalling; massive MIMO system; Data-aided channel estimation; Simulation; Channel estimation; Cross correlation; iterative channel estimation and signal detection; Signal processing; Uplink; Signal detection; Antenna; Large scale system
• ISSN: 1053-587X; 1941-0476
• DOI: 10.1109/TSP.2014.2321120

This paper is concerned with a uplink scheme for multicell large antenna systems. We study a channel estimation technique where partially decoded data is used to estimate the channel. We show that there are two types of interference components in this scheme that do not vanish even when the number of antennas grows to infinity. The first type, referred to as cross-contamination, is due to the correlation among the data signals from different users. The second type, referred to as self-contamination, is due to the dependency between the channel estimate and the estimation error. Cross contamination is in principle similar to pilot contamination in a conventional pilot-based channel estimation scheme, while self-contamination is unique for the data-aided scheme. For efficient use of the channel, the data part in a signaling frame is typically much longer than the pilot part for a practical system. Consequently, compared with pilot signals, data signals naturally have lower cross correlation. This fact reduces the cross-contamination effect in the data-aided scheme. Furthermore, self-contamination can be effectively suppressed by iterative processing. These results are confirmed by both analyses and simulations.