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This paper is concerned with pilot transmission schemes in a large antenna system with non-orthogonal multiple-access (NOMA). We investigate two pilot structures-orthogonal pilot (OP) and superimposed pilot (SP). In OP, pilots occupy dedicated time (or frequency) slots, while in SP, pilots are superimposed with data. We study an iterative data-aided channel estimation (IDACE) receiver, where partially decoded data are used to refine channel estimation. We analyze the achievable rates for systems with IDACE receivers for both OP and SP. We show that the optimal portion of pilot power tends to zero for SP with Gaussian signaling. This result is consistent with existing findings obtained via the replica method in statistical physics. The latter involves multiple codes, which is convenient for theoretical analysis but difficult to implement. As a comparison, IDACE is potentially implementable in practice. We demonstrate that, with code optimization, SP can outperform OP in a high mobility environment with a large number of users. We provide numerical examples to verify our analysis.
Ma et al. (Tue,) studied this question.