Constant Envelope Pilot-Based Low-Complexity CFO Estimation in Massive MU-MIMO Systems

Abstract: In this paper we consider a constant envelope pilot signal based carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The proposed algorithm performs spatial averaging on the periodogram of the received pilots across the base station (BS) antennas. Our study reveals that the proposed algorithm has complexity only linear in $M$ (the number of BS antennas). Further our analysis and numerical simulations also reveal that with fixed number of users and a fixed pilot length, the minimum required transmit pilot power decreases as $\frac{1}{\sqrt{M}}$ with increasing $M$, while maintaining a fixed desired mean squared error (MSE) of CFO estimation.