Pilot contamination is a fundamental bottleneck in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) cellular networks. In this letter, we aim to design a pilot scheduling method to reduce the effect of pilot contamination in multi-user multi-cell massive MIMO systems. Mathematically, the pilot scheduling problem can be formulated as a permutation-based optimization problem. However, finding the optimal solution requires an exhaustive search and is computationally prohibitive. Therefore, we propose a low-complexity near-optimal algorithm developed from the cross-entropy optimization framework to solve this problem. Simulation results reveal that our algorithm not only significantly outperforms the existing pilot-scheduling schemes but also achieves excellent performance with low complexity
