  The precoding in cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
technology relies on accurate knowledge of channel responses between users
(UEs) and access points (APs). Obtaining high-quality channel estimates in turn
requires the path losses between pairs of UEs and APs to be known. These path
losses may change rapidly especially in line-of-sight environments with moving
blocking objects. A difficulty in the estimation of path losses is pilot
contamination, that is, simultaneously transmitted pilots from different UEs
that may add up destructively or constructively by chance, seriously affecting
the estimation quality (and hence the eventual performance). A method for
estimation of path losses, along with an accompanying pilot transmission
scheme, is proposed that works for both Rayleigh fading and line-of-sight
channels and that significantly improves performance over baseline
state-of-the-art. The salient feature of the pilot transmission scheme is that
pilots are structurally phase-rotated over different coherence blocks
(according to a pre-determined function known to all parties), in order to
create an effective statistical distribution of the received pilot signal that
can be efficiently exploited by the proposed estimation algorithm.
