Enhancing Wideband Multiuser MIMO Uplink Using Superimposed Pilots: Joint Receiver Design

Superimposed pilot (SIP) significantly relaxes the excessive burden of pilot overhead especially in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, thus improving the spectral efficiency. In SIP-assisted systems, it is a challenging task to decouple the data and pilot which are superimposed in the power domain. In this paper, we devise an iterative joint channel estimation and detection design for a wideband multiuser MIMO uplink system using SIP. Specifically, by employing the channel decoding with iterative soft-symbol information propagation, the decoded data are remapped into soft symbols, enabling both data and pilot interference cancellation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed joint receiver design effectively decouples the data and pilot, achieving significant detection gains and superior performance in terms of throughput.