Many misconceptions float around about the pilot contamination phenomenon. While existent in any multi-cellular system, its effect tends to be particularly pronounced in Massive MIMO due to the presence of coherent interference, that scales proportionally to the coherent beamforming gain. (Chapter 4 in Fundamentals of Massive MIMO gives the details.)

A good system design definitely must not ignore pilot interference. While it is easily removed “on the average” through greater-than-one reuse, the randomness present in wireless communications – especially the shadow fading – will occasionally cause a few terminals to be severely hit by pilot contamination and bring down their performance. This is problematic whenever we are concerned about the provision of uniformly great service in the cell – and that is one of the principal selling arguments for Massive MIMO. Notwithstanding, the impact of pilot contamination can be reduced significantly in practice by appropriate pilot reuse and judicious power control. (Chapters 5-6 in Fundamentals of Massive MIMO gives many details.)

A more fundamental question is whether pilot contamination could be entirely overcome: Does there exist an upper bound on capacity that saturates as the number of antennas, M, is increased indefinitely? Some have speculated that it cannot; much in line with known capacity upper bounds for cellular base station cooperation. While this question may be of more academic than practical interest, it has long been open except for in some trivial special cases: If the channels of two terminals lie in non-overlapping subspaces and Bayesian channel estimation is used, the channel estimates will not be contaminated; capacity grows as log(M) when M increases without bound.

A much deeper result is established in this recent paper: the subspaces of the channel covariances may overlap, yet capacity grows as log(M). Technically, a Rayleigh fading with spatial correlation is assumed, and the correlation matrices for the contaminating terminals must only be linearly independent as M goes to infinity (exact conditions in the paper). In retrospect, this is not unreasonable given the substantial a priori knowledge exploited by the Bayesian channel estimator, but I found it amazing how weak the required conditions on the correlation matrices are. It remains unclear whether the result generalizes to the case of a growing number of interferers: letting the number of antennas go to infinity and then growing the network is not the same thing as taking an “infinite” (scalable) network and increasing the number of antennas. But this paper elegantly and rigorously answers a long-standing question that has been the subject of much debate in the community – and is a recommended read for anyone interested in the fundamental limits of Massive MIMO.

One question tends to reoccur: How many antennas can a Massive MIMO base station usefully deploy? Current thinking for macro-cellular is that 100-200 antennas would be suitable. Will we in the future see a lot more, thousands or so?

In that application, I don’t think so. Here is why.

What ultimately limits Massive MIMO is mobility: no more than half of the coherence time-bandwidth product should be occupied by pilot transmission activities. (This is the “half and half rule”.) In macro-cellular at 3 GHz, with highway mobility we may have on the order of 200 kHz x 1 millisecond coherence; that is 200 samples. With pilot reuse of 3 (that practically does away with pilot contamination), we could, then ultimately learn the channel to some 30 simultaneously served terminals – assuming mutually orthogonal pilots. Once the number of base station antennas M reaches beyond twice this number, with some margin – say M=100, the spectral efficiency grows logarithmically with M. That means, even doubling M yields only a 3dB effective SINR increase, that is a single extra bit per second/Hz per terminal. Beyond M=100 or M=200, it may not be worth it. Multiple antennas are only truly useful if they are used to multiplex, and mobility limits the amount of multiplexing we can perform.

So why not quadruple the number of antennas for additional coverage? May not be worth it either. Going from M=200 to M=2000 gives 10 dB – that pays for a 75% range extension, or, alternatively, a tenth of the losses incurred by an energy-saving coated window glass.

In stationary environments, the story is different – a topic that we will be returning to.

A series of recent papers,

• Channel Estimation and Performance Analysis of One-Bit Massive MIMO Systems
• One-bit massive MIMO: Channel estimation and high-order modulations,
• Performance of the Wideband Massive Uplink MIMO with One-Bit ADCs,

suggest the use of 1-bit ADCs in Massive MIMO base station receivers. Important studies of a concept, that offers great potential for cost saving and simplification of transceiver hardware.

Granted, much lower resolution will be sufficient in Massive MIMO than in conventional MIMO, but will one bit be sufficient? These papers indicate that the price to pay is not insignificant: the number of antennas may have to be doubled in some cases. Also, while the use of symbol-sampled models as in these studies may give correct order-of-magnitude estimates of capacity, much future work appears to remain to understand the effects of digital channelization/prefiltering and sampling rate conversion if 1-bit frontends are going to be used.