112 IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 21, NO. 1, JANUARY 2017
Pilot Allocation and Power Control in D2D Underlay Massive MIMO Systems
Hao Xu, Nuo Huang, Zhaohui Yang, Jianfeng Shi, Bingyang Wu, and Ming Chen
Abstract—In this letter, we propose pilot reuse among
device-to-device (D2D) users (DUs) in a D2D underlay massive
MIMO system to shorten pilot overhead. First, we derive a
lower bound on the average signal-to-interference-plus-noise
ratio of DUs. Then, a revised graph coloring-based pilot allo-
cation (RGCPA) algorithm is proposed to mitigate the pilot
contamination. Finally, a power control problem to minimize
D2D links’ data transmit power is formulated and an iterative
scheme is adopted to solve the problem. The simulation results
show that pilot overhead can be shortened greatly by pilot reuse,
and the effect of pilot contamination can be almost cancelled
using the proposed RGCPA algorithm. In addition, the power
control scheme converges rapidly.
Index Terms— Massive MIMO system, device-to-device com-
munication, pilot allocation, power control.
I. INTRODUCTION
C
URRENTLY, massive MIMO has triggered considerable
interest since it can achieve high network capacity and
reduce transmit powers [1]. With perfect channel state infor-
mation (CSI), the effect of small-scale fading, uncorrelated
noise and intra-cell interference can be averaged out com-
pletely in massive MIMO systems.
Due to its distinct advantages such as high spec-
trum efficiency, short packet delay and low energy
consumption [2], [3], device-to-device (D2D) communication
which enables nearby devices to communicate directly has
been introduced to massive MIMO systems [4]. To obtain
perfect CSI of all links, orthogonal pilots should be used
by all transmitters. This will increase pilot overhead greatly,
especially in a system with plenty of D2D users (DUs). Pilot
resources can be saved by reusing pilots among DUs, but it
will result in pilot contamination.
Pilot contamination mitigation has been widely studied
in multi-cell systems [5], [6]. To model the pilot assign-
ment problem, [5] proposed two game-theoretic approaches in
which a centralized coordinator was not needed. [6] proposed a
graph coloring based pilot allocation (GCPA) scheme to reduce
pilot contamination. However, these works mainly focused
on pilot allocation in conventional wireless communication
systems. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is a
Manuscript received April 25, 2016; revised June 8, 2016; accepted
July 24, 2016. Date of publication August 2, 2016; date of current version
January 6, 2017. This work was partially supported by the National 863 High
Technology Development Project under Grant 2014AA01A701, the National
Nature Science Foundation of China under Grants 61372106, 61223001,
61571125, the China Scholarship Council (CSC), the Program Sponsored for
Scientific Innovation Research of College Graduate in Jiangsu Province under
Grant KYLX15_0074, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central
Universities. The associate editor coordinating the review of this letter and
approving it for publication was O. Amin.
The authors are with the National Mobile Communications Research
Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China (e-mail:
xuhao2013@seu.edu.cn; huangnuo@seu.edu.cn; yangzhaohui@seu.edu.cn;
shijianfeng@seu.edu.cn; wubingyang@seu.edu.cn; chenming@seu.edu.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LCOMM.2016.2597236
lack of studies on pilot reuse (PR) and pilot contamination
mitigation in D2D underlay massive MIMO systems.
In this letter, we propose pilot reuse among DUs in a single-
cell D2D underlay massive MIMO system to shorten pilot
overhead. CUs use a set of orthogonal pilots to obtain perfect
CSI of cellular links. It is assumed that all transmitters use
the same time-frequency resource block to transmit signals.
We first derive a lower bound on DU’s average signal-to-
interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). Then, we propose a low-
complexity revised GCPA (RGCPA) algorithm to mitigate
pilot contamination caused by pilot reuse. Finally, an iterative
power control algorithm is adopted to minimize D2D links’
data transmit power. Both the RGCPA algorithm and the
power control algorithm are performed based on the averaged
slowly varying metric. Therefore, the algorithms can be run
periodically at a coarser frame level granularity, and the
computational overhead can be decreased greatly. Simulation
results show that pilot overhead can be shortened greatly
by PR, and the effect of pilot contamination can be almost
cancelled by using the proposed RGCPA algorithm. In addi-
tion, the power control process converges rapidly.
II. M
ATHEMATICAL MODELS
A. Network and Baseband Channel Models
Consider a single-cell D2D underlay massive MIMO system
with one base station (BS), T CUs and K D2D pairs. The set
of CUs and D2D pairs are denoted by T and K , respectively.
Assume that the BS has a large number of antennas and each
CU has one antenna. As for D2D communication, we consider
the SIMO transmission in [4], i.e., each D2D transmitter
(D2D-Tx) is equipped with one antenna, and each D2D
receiver (D2D-Rx) is equipped with M antennas. Note that the
analysis and results in this letter can be directly extended to
MIMO transmission. In this system, cellular uplink resources
are shared by DUs, and all transmitters use the same time-
frequency resource block to transmit signals, leading to
co-channel interference. The received data vector of D2D-Rx k
is given by
y
k
=
K
i=1
p
1/2
s,i
g
ik
x
i
+
T
t=1
q
1/2
s,t
h
tk
s
t
+ n
k
, ∀k ∈ K , (1)
where p
s,i
and x
i
denote the data transmit power and zero-
mean unit-variance data symbol of D2D-Tx i, respectively.
g
ik
v
1/2
ik
f
ik
is the channel vector from D2D-Tx i to
D2D-Rx k with v
ik
denoting the real-valued large-scale fad-
ing coefficient. Each entry of f
ik
represents the fast fading
coefficient from D2D-Tx i to the corresponding antenna at
D2D-Rx k. Assume that v
ik
is constant and known as a priori,
and f
ik
∼ C N(0, I
M
) with I
M
denoting the M dimensional
identity matrix. Similarly, q
s,t
, s
t
and h
tk
¯v
1/2
tk
¯
f
tk
are defined
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