Pilot Power Ratio for Uplink Sum-Rate Maximization in Zero-Forcing Based MU-MIMO Systems with Large Number of Antennas

This paper analyzes the pilot power ratio (PPR) in multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems with a large number of receive antennas (M) at the base station (BS). We consider zero-forcing based MU-MIMO orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Based on the deterministic uplink sum-rate approximation for imperfect channel state information, we can formulate the optimization problems in terms of the PPR to maximize the ergodic uplink sum-rate subject to the per-slot or per-symbol power constraint. Under the per-slot power constraint, the optimal PPR can be obtained in a closed form while under the per-symbol power constraint, we propose an iterative algorithm which generates a suboptimal PPR. Simulation results show that the proposed PPRs perform close to the optimal performance in terms of the sum-rate. Also, it is shown that the proposed PPRs outperform the equal power allocation. In particular, in the ZF-R based MU-MIMO OFDM system with 8 users and M=32 under the per-slot power constraint, the proposed PPR can achieve about 8bps/Hz performance gain compared to the equal power allocation.