Virtual pilot signal for massive MIMO-OFDM systems

A technology exploiting large number of antennas into the wireless transceiver, often called massive MIMO technology, has been received great attention in recent years. The benefits of this approach, however, can be realized only when the quality of estimated channel is ensured at both transmitter and receiver. In this paper, we propose a new channel estimation technique dealing with the pilot shortage in the massive MIMO systems. In a nutshell, we employ reliable data tones obtained from the iterative deteciton and decoding (IDD) as well as pilot signals in the estimation of channels. We show that the proposed method achieves substantial performance gain over conventional approaches employing pilot signals exclusively.