Multi-cell MMSE precoding in large-scale das with pilot contamination

This paper considers imperfect channel state information (CSI) in the downlink precoding of cellular multi-user large-scale distributed antenna system (DAS). Specifically, the uncertainty of channel estimation is mainly caused by the pilot reuse among users in adjacent cells. The phenomenon is termed as pilot contamination in a multi antenna system. Since the large-scale fading may vary from antenna to antenna, it's not easy to jointly estimate the channels from all antennas to a certain user. Instead, this paper only jointly estimates the downlink channels of the antennas at the same site, therefore with the same large-scale fading. Consequently, the channel estimation is executed in a distributed manner while the subsequent precoding is done in a centralized way. Based on the analysis of the properties of the DAS channel estimations, a multi-cell MMSE precoding scheme is proposed which aims to minimize the sum of intra- cell interference and the interference the cell pours to other cells. An approximation of the multi-cell MMSE precoding is further derived to reduce the computational complexity. Simulation results show significant performance gains over traditional singlecell precoding schemes.