On the Uplink Detection and Channel Estimation for Large Scale MU-MIMO over Uncorrelated Rician Fading with Multi-Antenna Users

This paper considers a single cell large-scale Multi-User MIMO system, where the user terminals equipped with L antennas. To investigate the uplink achievable rate performance, two linear detectors; Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC) and Zero forcing (ZF), have been considered. In this investigation, training based estimation has been employed to estimate the channel state information (CSI) from the uplink pilots. Since in the practical multipath environments, the channels may consist of a line-of-sight (LOS) component and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) components, this work evaluates the system performance over Rician fading model. The effect of the LOS component on the achievable rate performance of the two considered detectors has been discussed with different values of K-factor. Furthermore, the effect of increasing the number of user antennas on the uplink sum-rate in the Rician fading scenario has been discussed. Simulation results show that an increase in the number of user’s antennas will result in improvement in the achievable rate of the considered linear detectors.