  Next generation wireless networks aim at providing substantial improvements
in spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE). Massive MIMO has been
proved to be a viable technology to achieve these goals by spatially
multiplexing several users using many base station (BS) antennas. A potential
limitation of Massive MIMO in multicell systems is pilot contamination, which
arises in the channel estimation process from the interference caused by
reusing pilots in neighboring cells. A standard method to reduce pilot
contamination, known as regular pilot (RP), is to adjust the length of pilot
sequences while transmitting data and pilot symbols disjointly. An alternative
method, called superimposed pilot (SP), sends a superposition of pilot and data
symbols. This allows to use longer pilots which, in turn, reduces pilot
contamination. We consider the uplink of a multicell Massive MIMO network using
maximum ratio combining detection and compare RP and SP in terms of SE and EE.
To this end, we derive rigorous closed-form achievable rates with SP under a
practical random BS deployment. We prove that the reduction of pilot
contamination with SP is outweighed by the additional coherent and non-coherent
interference. Numerical results show that when both methods are optimized, RP
achieves comparable SE and EE to SP in practical scenarios.
