Smart Pilot Assignment for IoT in Massive MIMO Systems: A Path Towards Scalable IoT Infrastructure
This addresses scalability challenges for IoT infrastructure in 5G networks, but it is an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles pilot contamination in Massive MIMO systems for IoT by proposing a user scheduling and pilot assignment strategy, resulting in a 17% reduction in pilot overhead and an 8-14% improvement in spectral efficiency.
5G sets the foundation for an era of creativity with its faster speeds, increased data throughput, reduced latency, and enhanced IoT connectivity, all enabled by Massive MIMO (M-MIMO) technology. M-MIMO boosts network efficiency and enhances user experience by employing intelligent user scheduling. This paper presents a user scheduling scheme and pilot assignment strategy designed for IoT devices, emphasizing mitigating pilot contamination, a key obstacle to improving spectral efficiency (SE) and system scalability in M-MIMO networks. We utilize a user clustering-based pilot allocation scheme to boost IoT device scalability in M-MIMO systems. Additionally, our smart pilot allocation minimizes interference and enhances SE by treating pilot assignment as a graph coloring problem, optimizing it through integer linear programming (ILP). Recognizing the computational complexity of ILP, we introduced a binary search-based heuristic predicated on interference threshold to expedite the computation, while maintaining a near-optimal solution. The simulation results show a significant decrease in the required pilot overhead (about 17%), and substantial enhancement in SE (about 8-14%).