In this paper, we investigate channel estimation for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) empowered millimeter-wave (mmWave) multi-user single-input multiple-output communication systems using low-resolution quantization. Due to the high cost and power consumption of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) in large antenna arrays and for wide signal bandwidths, designing mmWave systems with low-resolution ADCs is beneficial. To tackle this issue, we propose a channel estimation design using task-based quantization that considers the underlying hybrid analog and digital architecture in order to improve the system performance under finite bit-resolution constraints. Our goal is to accomplish a channel estimation task that minimizes the mean squared error distortion between the true and estimated channel. We develop two types of channel estimators: a cascaded channel estimator for an RIS with purely passive elements, and an estimator for the separate RIS-related channels that leverages additional information from a few semi-passive elements at the RIS capable of processing the received signals with radio frequency chains. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed channel estimation designs exploiting task-based quantization outperform purely digital methods and can effectively approach the performance of a system with unlimited resolution ADCs. Furthermore, the proposed channel estimators are shown to be superior to baselines with small training overhead.

In this paper, we propose a Bayesian channel estimator for intelligent reflecting surface-aided (IRS-aided) millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with semi-passive elements that can receive the signal in the active sensing mode. Ultimately, our goal is to minimize the channel estimation error using the received signal at the base station and additional information acquired from a small number of active sensors at the IRS. Unlike recent works on channel estimation with semi-passive elements that require both uplink and downlink training signals to estimate the UE-IRS and IRS-BS links, we only use uplink training signals to estimate all the links. To compute the minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimates of all the links, we propose a novel variational inference-sparse Bayesian learning (VI-SBL) channel estimator that performs approximate posterior inference on the channel using VI with the mean-field approximation under the SBL framework. The simulation results show that VI-SBL outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines for IRS with passive reflecting elements in terms of the channel estimation accuracy and training overhead. Furthermore, VI-SBL with semi-passive elements is shown to be more spectral- and energy-efficient than the baselines with passive reflecting elements.

In this article, a channel estimator for wideband millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with hybrid architectures and low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is proposed. To account for the propagation delay across the antenna array, which cannot be neglected in wideband mmWave massive MIMO systems, the discrete time channel that models the spatial wideband effect is developed. Also, the training signal design that addresses inter-frame, inter-user, and inter-symbol interferences is investigated when the spatial wideband effect is not negligible. To estimate the channel parameters over the continuum based on the maximum a posteriori (MAP) criterion, the Newtonized fully corrective forward greedy selection-cross validation-based (NFCFGS-CV-based) channel estimator is proposed. NFCFGS-CV is a gridless compressed sensing (CS) algorithm, whose termination condition is determined by the CV technique. The CV-based termination condition is proved to achieve the minimum squared error (SE). The simulation results show that NFCFGS-CV outperforms state-of-the-art on-grid CS-based channel estimators.

In this paper, channel estimation for millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is considered. In the mmWave band, the number of propagation paths is small, which results in sparse virtual channels. To estimate sparse virtual channels based on the maximum a posteriori (MAP) criterion, sparsity-constrained optimization comes into play. In general, optimizing objective functions with sparsity constraints is NP-hard because of their combinatorial complexity. Furthermore, the coarse quantization of one-bit ADCs makes channel estimation a challenging task. In the field of compressed sensing (CS), the gradient support pursuit (GraSP) and gradient hard thresholding pursuit (GraHTP) algorithms were proposed to approximately solve sparsity-constrained optimization problems iteratively by pursuing the gradient of the objective function via hard thresholding. The accuracy guarantee of these algorithms, however, breaks down when the objective function is ill-conditioned, which frequently occurs in the mmWave band. To prevent the breakdown of gradient pursuit-based algorithms, the band maximum selecting (BMS) technique, which is a hard thresholder selecting only the "band maxima," is applied to GraSP and GraHTP to propose the BMSGraSP and BMSGraHTP algorithms in this paper.

In large-scale antenna systems, using one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) has recently become important since they offer significant reductions in both power and cost. However, in contrast to high-resolution ADCs, the coarse quantization of one-bit ADCs results in an irreversible loss of information. In the context of channel estimation, studies have been developed extensively to combat the performance loss incurred by one-bit ADCs. Furthermore, in the field of array signal processing, direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation combined with one-bit ADCs has gained growing interests recently to minimize the estimation error. In this paper, a channel estimator is proposed for one-bit ADCs where the channels are characterized by their angular geometries, e.g., uniform linear arrays (ULAs). The goal is to estimate the dominant channel among multiple paths. The proposed channel estimator first finds the DOA estimate using the maximum inner product search (MIPS). Then, the channel fading coefficient is estimated using the concavity of the log-likelihood function. The limit inherent in one-bit ADCs is also investigated, which results from the loss of magnitude information.