This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been
fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LCOMM.2017.2678465, IEEE
Communications Letters
Pilot-Data Superposition for Beam-Based FDD
Massive MIMO Downlinks
Zhiyuan Jiang, Sheng Zhou, Ruichen Deng, Zhisheng Niu, Shan Cao
Abstract—In this letter, we propose a superposition signaling of
pilots and data scheme (SPD) for beam-based frequency-division-
duplex (FDD) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
systems, which allows pilots and data to be transmitted simul-
taneously in the downlink. The proposed SPD scheme leverages
spatial channel correlations to reduce the dimensionality loss,
and more importantly, addresses the problem of uneven user
channel correlations by superposition signaling of pilots and
information bearing data symbols. Essentially, users with smaller
dimensionality loss entail less pilots based on the SPD scheme.
Simulations results reveal significant throughput gain by the SPD
scheme over state-of-the-art pilot-based approaches.
Index Terms—Massive MIMO, FDD, CSIT, channel training
I. I NTRODUCTION
Considerable amount of efforts have been dedicated to
developing efficient transmission schemes in massive multiple-
input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, especially regarding
the channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) ac-
quisition scheme. The CSIT is essentially the enabler for
downlink spatial multiplexing. The base station (BS) generates
the spatial precoder to separate the data streams for different
users based on the CSIT. Nonetheless, the acquisition of CSIT
poses a serious challenge to the systems, particularly for those
which operates in the frequency-division-duplex (FDD) mode.
The downside of the FDD system is the non-existence of the
reciprocity between uplink and downlink, due to the different
frequency bands they operate in. The time-division-duplex
(TDD) system leverages the reciprocity to acquire the CSIT
based on the uplink channel estimations, thereby significantly
reducing the acquisition overhead. The FDD system has to
exploit other viable solutions that incur less overhead.
The beam-based transmission schemes are recently pro-
posed to address this problem, which transform the spatial
signals from antenna domain to the beam domain based on
the second-order channel statistics (mostly channel correlation
matrix (CCM) information). The transformation leverages the
channel correlations among antennas, and is either based on
digital or analog signal processing [1]. In the beam domain,
the CSI usually exhibits certain degree of sparsity due to
limited signal angular spread, which leads to reduced CSIT
This work is sponsored in part by the Nature Science Foundation of China
(No. 61461136004, No. 61571265, No. 91638204), and Intel Collaborative
Research Institute for Mobile Networking and Computing.
Z. Jiang, S. Zhou, R. Deng, and Z. Niu are with Tsinghua National
Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University,
Beijing 100084, China (email: {zhiyuan,sheng.zhou}@tsinghua.edu.cn, dr-
c13@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn, niuzhs@tsinghua.edu.cn).
S. Cao is with the School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute
of Technology, Beijing 100081, China (email: caoshan@bit.edu.cn).
1089-7798 (c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
1
acquisition overhead (also referred to as dimensionality loss)
if judiciously designed [2]–[4]. However, existing beam-based
transmission schemes usually adopt the conventional channel
training approach, wherein the BS does not transmit data
signals until it finishes training all the spatial-multiplexed
users. This approach is not optimal in the scenario where
user channel correlations vary with each other, in which case
users with stronger channel correlations, hence theoretically
lower dimensionality loss, can actually start data transmis-
sions sooner than the conventional approach. A product-based
superposition signaling for multi-user MIMO downlink is
proposed in [5], which allows simultaneous pilots and data
transmissions. However, it only considers a two-user case.
In this letter, the superposition signaling of pilots and data
scheme (SPD) is proposed, by which users can have different
pilot lengths based on their distinct channel correlations. In
the transition period, the pilots and data symbols are super-
imposed, however not interfering with each other. Simulation
results show that the proposed SPD scheme has a significant
performance advantage over existing schemes in scenarios
with practical channel conditions.
Notations : The complex conjugate transpose of matrix
X is denoted by X † . The m-th to n-th columns of the matrix
X is denoted by X[:, m : n] (similarly for row denotations).
II. S YSTEM M ODEL AND P RELIMINARIES
In this section, the channel model and channel statistics
are illustrated. First, consider a narrow-band downlink signal
transmission, which is written as
y = Hx + n, (1)
where the M -dimensional vector x denotes the transmit signal
at each antenna port, which can be pilots, data, or superposi-
tion of pilots and data as will be proposed later. The channel
matrix H with dimensions N × M denotes the equivalent
baseband channel coefficients. Denoted by y as the receive
signals for all spatial multiplexed users, where the number of
users is N and we assume each user has a single antenna. The
Gaussian white additive noise is denoted by n.
In this letter, the block fading channel model is adopted
[2]. The size of the block is determined by the coherence of
the physical channel. For simplicity and better illustration, we
focus on the time block and omit the frequency coherence.
A. Spatially Correlated Channels
The CCM for the n-th user is defined as
Rn = E hn h†n ,
 
(2)
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LCOMM.2017.2678465, IEEE
Communications Letters
† Training pilots for all users
where we denote H = [h1 ... hn ... hN ] . In the case where
the channel coefficients are identically independently distribut-
ed (i.i.d.), the CCM is an identity matrix with a scaling
factor. However, the spatial correlation of the antennas in
reality is not i.i.d. [6]. Moreover, depending on the correlation
of antenna elements, the CCM is sometimes rank-deficient.
Define the singular-value-decomposition (SVD) of the CCM
(n) (n) (n)
as Rn = Un Σn Un† , wherein Σn = diag[λ1 , λ2 , ..., λM ],
assuming arranged in non-ascending order. Define the β-
effective rank of the CCM, i.e., rnβ , as the number of singular
values which contains β of the total power of the channel,
where β ∈ [0, 1]. It is discovered that such rank-deficiency can
be beneficial to FDD massive MIMO systems, since the system
can estimate the CCM with low cost and leverage it to reduce
the CSIT acquisition overhead and enhance the throughput
[2] [3]. Such schemes are referred to as beam-based schemes,
because the CCM is often closely related to the signal spatial
directions (beam direction) and spread (beamwidth).
III. SPD OVERVIEW
In this section, an overview of the proposed SPD scheme
is presented. First, the conventional pilot-based FDD massive
MIMO downlink transmission is reviewed. After that, the
beam-based scheme is also illustrated, based on which the
SPD scheme is proposed.
A. Conventional Pilot-Based FDD Massive MIMO Downlink
Transmissions
In the conventional closed-loop pilot-based FDD massive
multi-user MIMO downlink transmission scheme, the BS first
broadcasts downlink training signals (pilots) and thereby the
users estimate their respective channels. Due to the broad-
casting nature of the pilots, based on existing transmission
schemes [3] [7] the BS does not transmit downlink data until
it finishes training all users, even though spatial properties
of users are diversified, in which case a shorter pilot length
may be sufficient for some users due to their more correlated
channels. Specifically, a schematic of the conventional pilot-
based approach is depicted in Fig. 1(a), wherein a 3-user case
is used as an example. In the example, the BS has to use 4 time
slots, assuming the BS has 4 antenna ports (i.i.d. channels),
to send common training pilots, before spatial multiplexing
the data streams for 3 users based on, e.g., minimum-mean-
square-error (MMSE) precoders1 . Note that without beam-
based transmission scheme, the pilot overhead (dimensionality
loss) is at least the number of BS antenna ports.
B. Proposed SPD Scheme with Beam-Based Transmissions
In the beam-based FDD massive MIMO downlink trans-
mission schemes, the system utilizes the CCM information
to reduce the pilot overhead to train each user [2] [3] to
a quantity which is related to the signal angular spread of
1 CSI feedback process for FDD massive MIMO is also very important and
is extensively studied in the literature, e.g., in [8]. Since it only occupies
uplink resources and can be studied separately with downlink training, the
CSI feedback is assumed to be perfect and with no delay in this letter.
1089-7798 (c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
2
Spatial multiplexed data
Signal for user 1
Signal for user 2
Signal for user 3
1 2 3 4 5 6
Time slots
Training  Superposition 
pilots for all  signaling of pilots  Spatial multiplexed data
users and data
Signal for user 1
Signal for user 2
Signal for user 3
1 2 3 4 5 6
Time slots
Fig. 1. Downlink transmission schematic of conventional pilot-based and
proposed SPD scheme.
the user [6]. However, as the propagation channel differs, the
angular spread, hence the pilot overhead needed by each user
also varies. A question arises that how much pilot overhead
is needed to train all users with distinct channel correlations.
To better illustrate, three claims are discussed.
1) The overhead is determined by the angular spread
Pspanned by all users: Mathematically, τ →
jointly
N
rank n=1 Rn . The BS has to train all signal directions to
cover the whole spatial domain. This method is easily verified
to be sufficient since all the directions are covered. Despite
of the unsophisticated approach, it is widely adopted in to-
day’s systems, such as the channel state information reference
signals (CSI-RSs) in long-term-evolution (LTE) systems (non-
beamformed).
2) The overhead is determined by the maximum
angular spread among users: Mathematically,
τ → maxn (rank (Rn )). This can be achieved by beam-space
schemes, e.g., in [2] [3]. To quickly illustrate, the BS can
send a training sequence by which each user can receive some
training power (can be achieved by the superposition of pilots
dedicated for each direction), with the length determined
by the maximum angular spread of the users. Therefore,
assuming high signal-to-noise (SNR) regime, the pilot length
is sufficient for every user since the worst case (the user with
maximum angular spread) is addressed.
3) The overhead is determined by the minimum angular
spread among users: Mathematically, τ → minn (rank (Rn )).
By leveraging the SPD scheme proposed in the letter, the
data symbols and the pilots can be superposed such that the
users with smaller angular spread can finish their channel
training sooner than others2 , see Fig. 1(b). In this way, the
pilot overhead, in the sense of pure training symbols without
any information-bearing data, is only determined by the user
with the minimum pilot need. The detailed scheme will be
explained in the section followed.
IV. SPD A LGORITHM D ESCRIPTION
Based on the above discussions, the proposed SPD scheme
has the advantage of pilot overhead reduction in beam-based
FDD massive MIMO systems. The most challenging part is to
2 In practice, instead of the first-train-then-serve approach, the pilots are
inserted among data symbols to follow the time/frequency channel variations.
Therefore, the sooner the user finishes channel training simply means the less
inserted pilots it needs.
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LCOMM.2017.2678465, IEEE
Communications Letters
3

transmit pre-defined pilots (known by the BS and users) and the users which have finished channel training. The set of time
user dedicated data simultaneously without interfering each index which users start data transmission is denoted by Ts . The
other. One cannot simply use traditional spatial multiplexing SPD scheme can be summarized that at each time slot, check
schemes such as MMSE precoders to separate pilots and data if some users have finished training based on their channel
symbols. The fundamental reason is that for some users, the correlations. If so, upgrade the precoding and transmit signals.
training has not finished. Therefore, the BS does not have Otherwise, keep the current signalling and proceed. Several
sufficient CSIT to perform the spatial sepration. important design aspects are explained in what follows.
On a high level, the SPD scheme addresses the problem by
re-using the data symbols for some users as pilot symbols for A. User “Echo” Feedback
other users. Note that although this leads to the fact that the The step 7, concretely, is realized by the following approach.
other users have no knowledge of the pilots used, which are Denote the receive signal of the user n at time t as
actually unpredictable user data symbols, the BS, however, has
yn (t) = hn (t)x(t) + zn (t). (3)
perfect knowledge of these. Therefore, the downlink channel
estimation process whose purpose is to translate the receive Conventionally, the user has knowledge of the transmitted
signal to channel estimations, can be executed at the BS symbols (pilots) and thereby estimates the downlink channel,
side, rather than at the user side conventionally. The detailed i.e., hn (t), and feeds it back to the BS. However in the pro-
procedure is illustrated in Algorithm 1. Note that we assume posed design, due to the fact that the transmitted symbols are
to use rnβ pilot symbols to train the n-th user, i.e., one pilot probably data for other users, there are no appropriate pilots
symbol for each significant channel rank. Without loss of available, and hence the user cannot estimate the downlink
generality, we assume r1β ≤ ... ≤ rNβ
. The block length is channel. The “echo” approach is proposed in the sense that
T . Denote R = n Rn = U ΣU † as the SVD of R. Define the user repeats what it hears, i.e., directly feeds back its
P
a power normalization function, N(X) which normalizes X to receive signal yn (t). The feedback can be based on either
satisfy the power constraint of the BS antenna array according digital or analog feedback, both of which are well-known in
to practical considerations, e.g., power backoff, clipping and the literature [9]. Thereby the BS performs, e.g., the MMSE
etc. The regularized zero-forcing (RZF) precoder is adopted estimation, on the echoed signals and obtain the CSIT, based
as an instance. on its knowledge of the transmitted signals, including not
only the data symbols but also the precoding matrix which
Algorithm 1: SPD is determined by the BS in previous transmissions3 . In other
Input: User data (complex-valued basedband symbols) to words, in certain period of the transmission, there is no
be transmitted St . dedicated pilots where the precoded user data symbols are
Output: Transmit signals at each time xt . used instead. This echo feedback approach is the key to enable
β
1 Initial training: ∀n ∈ [1, N ], ts (n) = rn + 1; the superposition signaling of pilots and data and the CSIT
  acquisition thereby.
Ts = [ts (1), ..., ts (N )]; X = N U (:, 1 : r1β ) ; nf = φ;
Transmit X in the first r1β time slots. B. Superposition Signaling and Power Allocation
2 for t = 1 : T do In the 13-th step, the downlink transmitted signal is the
3 nnew = find(t = Ts ), i.e., find users who just finish superposition of precoded data and a “pilot” vector which
training; is orthogonal to the channels of the intended users. The
4 nf ← [nf , nnew ]; mix-in of the pilot vector is to expand the dimensions of
5 if nnew 6= φ then the transmitted signals to avoid restricting the transmission
6 td = 1; power to the column space of W , which would damage the
7 Estimate the channel coefficients for users nnew , channel training performance. Meanwhile, it still does not
and denote
 the estimated −1channel matrix as H̄f ; introduce any interference to the users with data transmissions.
† † However, it should be noted that the transmitted signal is not
8 W = N H̄f H̄f + αI H̄f ;
conventional pilot, since it is superposed with the data symbols
9 Calculate W⊥ , which satisfies H̄f W⊥ = 0 and and that the users have no knowledge of it.
W⊥ ← N(W⊥ ); The power allocation between the precoded data and the
10 else pilot vector is a tradeoff between the data rates for users that
11 td ← td + 1; have finished training and the channel estimation quality of
12 if t ≤ ts (N ) then the users that are still under training. The optimum power
13 xt ← √12 (W st + W⊥ (:, td )); allocation is left for future work, whereas equally dividing the
power between data and pilots is adopted here.
14 else
15 xt ← W st ; V. S IMULATIONS
16 Transmit xt , and X ← [X, xt ]; In the simulations, the CCM for each user is generated
based on the one-ring model [10]. The signal angular spread is
3 The CSI required for decoding at the user side is conveyed by dedicated
In step 13 of Algorithm 1, st denotes the data symbols for training pilots which scale well with the number of BS antennas.

1089-7798 (c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/LCOMM.2017.2678465, IEEE
Communications Letters
Fig. 2. Comparisons with different block lengths (BLs) of the SPD and the
TS schemes, β = 0.9.
Fig. 3. The impact of BS antenna size, SNR = 8 dB.
generated based on the uniform distribution on [0, 30] degrees.
With the CCM and the Karhunen-Loeve representation, 1000
blocks of instantaneous CSI is generated for simulations. The
user rate is calculated by averaging the spectral efficiency
during the block length of the channel, accounting for the
dimensionality loss. The RZF precoder is used. The spectral
efficiency in the data transmissions is calculated by applying
the Shannon formula to the signal to noise plus interference
ratio (SINR) for each user given the precoder and channel
realization. The resulting user rate is then averaged over 1000
realizations. We evaluate the throughput performance of the
proposed SPD scheme, in comparison with the state-of-the-
art training sequence design proposed in [3] (TS), which
optimizes the training sequences based on the CCMs and
shows significant performance improvements compared with
other beam-based schemes. In Fig. 2, the sum rate of all
users is compared between the SPD and TS schemes, under
a variety of SNRs and block lengths. The SNR in the x-
axis is the per-antenna downlink SNR. The training SNR is
set 10 dB higher than the data transmission SNR, since it is
quite common that the channel estimation can benefit from the
frequency processing gain based on, e.g., the discrete-cosine-
transformation (DCT) algorithm. The number of BS antennas
is 128, and the number of users is 16. It is observed that the
1089-7798 (c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
4
SPD scheme has evident advantage over the TS scheme when
the block length is relatively short, e.g., 150. Note that for
reference, a typical block length in LTE systems is a resource
block of 168 resource elements. Another observation is that
generally the TS scheme performs closer to, or sometimes
better than the SPD scheme when SNR is low, due to the
fact that the channel estimation quality is of higher priority in
this regime and that the TS scheme uses dedicated pilots. The
impact of the number of BS antennas, which is directly related
to the dimensionality loss in FDD massive MIMO systems, is
investigated in Fig. 3. Essentially, the SPD scheme performs
better compared to the TS scheme, as the scenario becomes
more unfriendly to the FDD massive MIMO system, which
is the scenario with more dimensionality loss due to more
BS antennas, or shorter block length which indicates that the
channels are changing more rapidly. In particular, the SPD
scheme outperforms the TS scheme under practical massive
MIMO conditions, when the number of BS antennas is more
than approximately 100 under the block length between 150
and 250.
VI. C ONCLUSIONS
In this letter, the SPD scheme is proposed, based on which
the pilots and data symbols can be superimposed. The SPD
scheme applies to the beam-based FDD massive MIMO sys-
tems, wherein the users have diversified channel correlations.
It is found that the SPD scheme outperforms state-of-the-art
beam-based schemes, especially when the BS antenna size
grows large or the channel changes rapidly.
R EFERENCES
[1] J. Brady, N. Behdad, and A. M. Sayeed, “Beamspace MIMO for
millimeter-wave communications: System architecture, modeling, anal-
ysis, and measurements,” IEEE Trans. Antennas and Propagat., vol. 61,
pp. 3814–3827, Jul. 2013.
[2] A. Adhikary, J. Nam, J.-Y. Ahn, and G. Caire, “Joint spatial division
and multiplexing: The large-scale array regime,” IEEE Trans. Inform.
Theory, vol. 59, pp. 6441–6463, Oct. 2013.
[3] Z. Jiang, A. Molisch, G. Caire, and Z. Niu, “Achievable rates of FDD
massive MIMO systems with spatial channel correlation,” IEEE Trans.
Wireless Commun., vol. 14, pp. 2868–2882, May 2015.
[4] W. Shen, L. Dai, Y. Shi, B. Shim, and Z. Wang, “Joint channel training
and feedback for FDD massive MIMO systems,” IEEE Trans. Veh. Tech.,
vol. 65, pp. 8762–8767, Oct 2016.
[5] Y. Li and A. Nosratinia, “Coherent product superposition for downlink
multiuser MIMO,” IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 14, pp. 1746–
1754, Mar. 2015.
[6] Z. Jiang, S. Zhou, and Z. Niu, “On dimensionality loss in FDD massive
MIMO systems,” in IEEE Conference on Wireless Communications and
Networking (WCNC’ 2015), Mar. 2015.
[7] G. Caire and S. Shamai, “On the achievable throughput of a multiantenna
Gaussian broadcast channel,” IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, vol. 49,
pp. 1691–1706, Jul. 2003.
[8] J. Choi, D. Love, and T. Kim, “Trellis-extended codebooks and suc-
cessive phase adjustment: A path from LTE-Advanced to FDD massive
MIMO systems,” IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. PP, no. 99, pp. 1–
1, 2014.
[9] B. Tomasi, A. Decurninge, and M. Guillaud, “SNOPS: short non-
orthogonal pilot sequences for downlink channel state estimation in FDD
massive MIMO,” arXiv:1609.01917, 2016.
[10] D.-S. Shiu, G. J. Foschini, M. J. Gans, and J. M. Kahn, “Fading
correlation and its effect on the capacity of multielement antenna
systems,” IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 48, pp. 502–513, Mar 2000.