Effects of the length of training sequence on the achievable rate in FDD massive MIMO system

Abstract

This paper considers a downlink massive MIMO frequency division duplexing (FDD) system. Due to the large number of antennas, the required length of training sequence for downlink training significantly increases in FDD mode, which leads to prohibitive overhead in real system. Thus, in this work we investigate how the length of training sequence affects the system performance. For this purpose, we derive an analytical expression of the ergodic achievable rate from a worst case viewpoint with the the training sequence length as a parameter in it. It is revealed from the analytical results that i.) the length of training sequence divided by the number of base station antennas approaches to zero yet the achievable rate can increase to infinity as long as the antenna number is sufficient large; ii.) there is a ceiling effect on the achievable rate if the antenna number grows large with any fixed training length. Furthermore, we propose a guideline for the selection of the training length. Numerical results validate the derivations and analysis.