Title: An investigation of channel estimation schemes for millimeter wave massive MIMO systems with lens antenna array
Authors: Eze Gerald C.
Volume: 9
Issue: 8
Pages: 29-37
Publication Date: 2025/08/28
Abstract:
This work studies the beamspace channel estimation (CE) schemes for millimeter-wave (mm-wave) massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems with lens antenna array. Lens antenna array is assumed as an effective beam selection mechanism in mm-wave massive MIMO systems. Firstly, the selecting network for mm-wave beamspace systems is used to formulate the CE problem and reduce the number of required radio-frequency (RF) chains. Efficient CE schemes are needed to use the advantage of the beam selection paradigm. Previously, compressive sensing (CS)-based schemes are used to utilize existing sparsity for CE in these mm-wave beamspace systems. Among them, least squares (LS), support detection (SD) and orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) are the most popular ones. Then, by utilization of the architectural features of mm-wave beamspace channel, we propose an improved sparsity mask detection (SMD) based CE scheme with moderate number of instants (i.e., pilot overhead). The performance analysis shows the effectiveness of the improved SMD scheme can estimate the support of sparse beamspace channel with comparable accuracy than traditional schemes. Numerical results verify that the improved SMD scheme outperforms SD scheme and other classical schemes such as both LS and OMP variants.