Coordinated beamforming with reduced overhead for the downlink of multiuser MIMO systems

We consider the coordinated beamforming for the downlink of multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Since each mobile needs to obtain effective channel parameters by using dedicated pilots each beamformed by a user-specific transmit beamformer, the pilot overhead increases linearly with the number of users. In this paper, we propose a novel technique that reduces the pilot overhead using the orthogonal property of effective channels. Simulation results show that the proposed approach achieves higher sum-rate, because unused pilot tones can be utilized to transmit additional data instead.