Pilot Contamination Reduction in Multi-User TDD Systems

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of interference mitigation in multi-cell multi-antenna time division duplex (TDD) wireless systems for downlink transmission. An efficient way to obtain channel state information (CSI) at the base station is by using uplink pilots and reciprocity of the downlink channel. At the same time, it has been shown that pilots from different cells contaminate each other, resulting in corruption of precoding matrices used by base stations, and high inter-cell interference. This paper studies the effects of shifting the location of pilots in time frames used in neighboring cells, and its effectiveness in obtaining better channel estimates, and, thereby, inter-cell interference reduction.