Pilot Beam Pattern Design for Channel Estimation in Massive MIMO Systems

In this paper, the problem of pilot beam pattern design for channel estimation in massive multiple-input multiple-output systems with a large number of transmit antennas at the base station is considered, and a new algorithm for pilot beam pattern design for optimal channel estimation is proposed under the assumption that the channel is a stationary Gauss-Markov random process. The proposed algorithm designs the pilot beam pattern sequentially by exploiting the properties of Kalman filtering and the associated prediction error covariance matrices and also the channel statistics such as spatial and temporal channel correlation. The resulting design generates a sequentially-optimal sequence of pilot beam patterns with low complexity for a given set of system parameters. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.