  We consider a massive MU-MIMO downlink time-division duplex system where a
base station (BS) equipped with many antennas serves several single-antenna
users in the same time-frequency resource. We assume that the BS uses linear
precoding for the transmission. To reliably decode the signals transmitted from
the BS, each user should have an estimate of its channel. In this work, we
consider an efficient channel estimation scheme to acquire CSI at each user,
called beamforming training scheme. With the beamforming training scheme, the
BS precodes the pilot sequences and forwards to all users. Then, based on the
received pilots, each user uses minimum mean-square error channel estimation to
estimate the effective channel gains. The channel estimation overhead of this
scheme does not depend on the number of BS antennas, and is only proportional
to the number of users. We then derive a lower bound on the capacity for
maximum-ratio transmission and zero-forcing precoding techniques which enables
us to evaluate the spectral efficiency taking into account the spectral
efficiency loss associated with the transmission of the downlink pilots.
Comparing with previous work where each user uses only the statistical channel
properties to decode the transmitted signals, we see that the proposed
beamforming training scheme is preferable for moderate and low-mobility
environments.
