A pilot and channel estimation method for SDMA MIMO transmission downlink is provided in the present invention, and the method provides possibility for saving the orthogonal pilot resources; the pilot signals of different users in the transmitting antenna domain can occupy the same time-frequency resources, and thereby the pilot overhead of system resources can be reduced greatly; the method includes: for the MIMO transmission downlink that employs pre-coding for SDMA, taking the quantity of orthogonal pilot resources occupied by the users in the pre-coding domain as the number of data streams that can be transmitted or the number of spatial dimensions occupied first, at the transmitting end of the base station; then, performing SDMA transmission pre-coding for the orthogonal pilots in the pre-coding domain in the same way as the data signals, to obtain the pilot signals of the users in the transmitting antenna domain; wherein, the pilots of the users in the pre-coding domain can be orthogonal in the frequency domain or code domain, and the pilots of different users in the pre-coding domain can be identical or not identical to each other; the pilot signals of different users in the transmitting antenna domain can occupy the same time-frequency resources.