PILOT SIGNALS FOR DOWNLINK CHANNEL ESTIMATION IN A LARGE-SCALE ANTENNA SYSTEM

摘要

The present invention relates to a downlink channel detection method and device for use in a large-scale antenna system. In an embodiment, a method (110) for use in a base station of a large- scale antenna MIMO system is provided, wherein the base station has N antennas, and N may be larger than 100. The method includes: determining NBF orthogonal pilot patterns and other M orthogonal pilot patterns (111); dividing the whole space of possible direction of arrivals into NBF subspaces; sending a pilot signal on each subspace of the NBF subspaces, wherein pilot signals on the NBF subspaces are respectively using the NBF pilot patterns (112); and sending pilot signals over at least a part of the M pilot patterns through each of the N transmitting antennas, in a manner that sub- directions in each subspace use the orthogonal pilot patterns (113), where the value of NBF is 10 %-15% of N, and the value of M is 15 %-50 % of N. By using a sparse signal recovery algorithm, pilot overhead is reduced, and at least equivalent system performance can be achieved.