• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.718-723
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• 2017

We propose a pilot hopping scheme that improves the limited system capacity due to pilot contamination in multi-cell environment with large-scale antenna arrays at a base station, assuming the infinite number of antennas. In the conventional fixed pilot scheme, each user obtains the same signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) over a long period of time. Therefore, a user with strong interference has continuously low SIR which degrades its service quality. In the proposed pilot hopping scheme, different pilot signals are used for each time slot, and different amounts of interference are received every time. When such a pilot hopping technique is applied, the SIR fluctuates at every time slot. When the Hybrid Automatic Repeat & reQuest (HARQ) technique is applied in such a channel, the outage probability and transmission rate are improved. We show that there is the performance gain of the proposed scheme over the conventional scheme through computer simulations.