  Phase noise (PN) is a major disturbance in MIMO systems, where the
contribution of different oscillators at the transmitter and the receiver side
may degrade the overall performance and offset the gains offered by MIMO
techniques. This is even more crucial in the case of massive MIMO, since the
number of PN sources may increase considerably. In this work, we propose an
iterative receiver based on the application of the expectation-maximization
algorithm. We consider a massive MIMO framework with a general association of
oscillators to antennas, and include other channel disturbances like imperfect
channel state information and Rician block fading. At each receiver iteration,
given the information on the transmitted symbols, steepest descent is used to
estimate the PN samples, with an optimized adaptive step size and a
threshold-based stopping rule. The results obtained for several test cases show
how the bit error rate and mean square error can benefit from the proposed
phase-detection algorithm, even to the point of reaching the same performance
as in the case where no PN is present, offering better results than a
state-of-the-art alternative. Further analysis of the results allow to draw
some useful trade-offs respecting final performance and consumption of
resources.
