Data-Aided Channel Estimation for Multiple-Antenna Users in Massive MIMO Systems

In this paper, we study the performance of large-scale MIMO network where the base station has a large number of antennas and performs semi-blind channel estimation. We show that one can increase the number of antennas at the user side without increasing the overhead imposed by the channel estimation linearly with the number of user antennas. Specifically, we propose a simple data-aided channel estimation scheme which exploits the quasi-orthogonality of the channel vectors and takes advantage of the conventional pilot-aided channel estimation performed for the first antenna at each user. Two schemes are then analyzed using the extra antenna(s) at the users: data-multiplexing and interference alignment. We obtain achievable rates for the proposed uplink multi-cell MIMO system in both schemes. The rate bounds are tight and the system performance is also analyzed in terms of the outage probability to study the effect of the data length used for channel estimation scheme.