Beam Grouping Based RS Resource Reuse and De-Contamination in Large Scale MIMO Systems

It is well known that large scale multiple-input multiple-output (LS-MIMO) systems are very attractive technology to increase both spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE). However, one of big obstacles to the realization of the LS-MIMO system is the overhead of reference signals (RSs), since the number of RS increases as the number of transmitter (TX) antennas increases. In this paper, the RS overhead problem is analyzed, and we propose an RS overhead reduction scheme based on beam grouping, which is called beam grouping based resource reuse (BGRR). The proposed scheme divides one cell into several sectors and reuses the RS resources for the different sectors. The resource conflict is reduced using beam separability. According to the analysis and the simulation results, the proposed scheme can remarkably reduce the RS overhead and improve the SE performance significantly.