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Covariance-Aided CSI Acquisition with Non-Orthogonal Pilots in Massive MIMO Systems

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems use antenna arrays with a large number of antenna elements to serve many different users simultaneously. The large number of antennas in the system makes, however, the channel state information (CSI) acquisition strategy design critical and particularly challenging. Interestingly, in the context of massive MIMO systems, channels exhibit a large degree of spatial correlation which can be exploited to cope with the dimensionality problem in CSI acquisition. With the final objective of analyzing the benefits of covariance-aided uplink multi-user CSI acquisition in massive MIMO systems, here we compare the channel estimation mean-square error (MSE) for (i) conventional CSI acquisition, which does not assume any knowledge on the user spatial covariances and uses orthogonal pilot sequences; and (ii) covariance-aided CSI acquisition, which exploits the individual covariance matrices for channel estimation and possibly uses non-orthogonal pilot sequences. We apply a large-system analysis to the latter case, for which new asymptotic MSE expressions are established under various assumptions on the distributions of the pilot sequences and on the covariance matrices. We link these expressions to those describing the estimation MSE of conventional CSI acquisition with orthogonal pilot sequences of some equivalent length. This analysis provides insights about how much the CSI acquisition process can be overloaded (in the sense of allowing estimating CSI with sufficient accuracy for more users than the number resource elements allocated for training) when a covariance-aided approach is adopted, hinting at potentially significant gains in the spectral efficiency of CSI acquisition in Massive MIMO.