Performance evaluation of MIMO communication systems based on superimposed pilots

In the recent past, a number of publications have suggested superimposed pilots (SIP) for channel estimation in MIMO systems. However, the performance gain achieved by SIP compared to conventional (time-multiplexed) training is still questionable. In this paper we introduce a framework for modeling a general SIP scheme, of which the conventional scheme is a special case. Utilizing this framework, we derive a lower bound on the channel capacity to compare the performance between the two systems. It is found that in certain scenarios (high SNR, many receive antennas and short coherence times), it is beneficial to also transmit data during the training mode (i.e., use SIP). The main conclusion though, is that for most cases where these kind of schemes would be realistic, i.e. for systems with coherence lengths of more than a few symbols, the general SIP-scheme reduces to the conventional scheme. Hence, rendering the same capacity.