Mitigating the Interference Caused by Pilot Contamination in Multi-cell Massive Multiple Input Multiple Output Systems Using Low Density Parity Check Codes in Uplink Scenario

The effects of pilot contamination (PC) on the performance of multi-cell multi-user massive multiple input multiple output (MC-MU-m-MIMO) system in uplink has been analyzed in this article. In a multi-cell scenario, the channel estimation (CE) at the desired cell using pilot reuse to avoid significant overhead results in poor CE due to PC. The improvement in degraded performance due to the effect of PC has been shown using low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes. The comparative analysis of performance in terms of variation in bit error rate (BER) with the signal to noise ratio (SNR) for LDPC coded and uncoded information blocks of users has been shown when the number of cells sharing the same frequency band is varied. Further, the expression for sum-rate has been derived and its variation with the number of base station (BS) antennas has also been shown. The simulated results have shown that the LDPC coded scheme performs better than the uncoded counterpart and the sum-rate capacity increases when the strength of channel coefficients between the BS antennas of the desired cell and the users of remaining cells is less.