A Pilot Allocation Algorithm Based on Coalitional Game Theory for Distributed MIMO Systems

With the advent of the 5G era, the number of user terminals has increased dramatically. However, the limitation of pilot resources results in pilot reuse among user terminals, which makes the performance of massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems constrained by pilot contamination. In this paper, we propose a pilot allocation algorithm based on coalitional game theory to minimize the error of channel estimation in distributed MIMO systems. The simulation results show that the performance of the algorithm is very close to the exhaustive method with low complexity and far better than the random pilot reuse.