ICA based decoding for a multi-cell massive MIMO uplink system

Pilot signal reuse in neighboring cells causes the pilot contamination, and performance will degrade significantly in a multi-cell, massive MIMO uplink system. In this paper, based on Principle Component Analysis (PCA), Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and a few pilot signals, a new decoding method is proposed. In this method, we implement the PCA to reduce the dimension of the received signals from both inter-cell and intra-cell, carry out the ICA to separate the transmitted signals from the received signals, and make use of the pilot signals to overcome the ambiguity of the ICA so that the order of the transmitted signals can be determined. Therefore, channel estimation is not necessary in this method, and moreover, the information about path-loss and shadowing factor of channel can be unknown. Simulations show that, the stronger the interference from the inter-cell or the intra-cell, the better the performance of the proposed decoding method.