Analysis and Design of Channel Estimation in Multicell Multiuser MIMO OFDM Systems

This paper investigates the uplink transmission in multicell multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The system model considers imperfect channel estimation, pilot contamination (PC), and multicarrier and multipath channels. Analytical expressions are first presented on the mean square error (MSE) of two classical channel estimation algorithms [i.e., least squares (LS) and minimum mean square error (MMSE)] in the presence of PC. Then, a simple H-infinity (H-inf) channel estimation approach is proposed to have good suppression to PC. This approach exploits the space-alternating generalized expectation–maximization (SAGE) iterative process to decompose the multicell multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) problem into a series of single-cell single-user single-input single-output (SISO) problems, which reduces the complexity significantly. According to the analytic results given herein, increasing the number of pilot subcarriers cannot mitigate PC, and a clue for suppressing PC is obtained. It is shown from the results that the H-inf has better suppression capability to PC than classical estimation algorithms. Its performance is close to that of the optimal MMSE as the length of channel impulse response (CIR) is increased. By using the SAGE process, the performance of the H-inf does not degrade when the number of antennas is large at the base station (BS).