Accurate estimation of channel state information (CSI) is crucial to realize the full potential of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems. Despite the high accuracy of existing CSI estimators, the high computational complexity makes them impractical for real-world massive MIMO systems. So, developing a highly accurate and low-complexity estimator has been a long-standing challenge in the field of massive MIMO. In this paper, we present a channel estimation scheme that significantly reduces computational complexity while achieving high accuracy. Firstly, we design a two-stage training protocol whereby only part of the transmit and receive antennas are activated for signal emission or reception. Secondly, we apply the low-complexity Least-Square (LS) estimator to acquire two sub-blocks of the channel matrix. Relying on the inherent low-rank property of channel matrix, the complete channel matrix is reconstructed via a randomized matrix approximation technique. Thirdly, we consider three different power allocation schemes to further optimize the pilot power in 2-stage training process. The theoretical bounds of estimation error for our CSI estimator are derived, and the optimal power allocation strategy is thus obtained by minimizing this error bound. Numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate our proposed method. As shown, the theoretical error bound is tight, and the optimal power allocation can achieve the substantial gain. Our CSI estimator incurs the same complexity as the popular LS estimator, whilst the estimation accuracy is improved by ~5 dB, which has the great promise to new-generation massive MIMO communications.

To glean the benefits offered by massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems, channel state information must be accurately acquired. Despite the high accuracy, the computational complexity of classical linear minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimator becomes prohibitively high in the context of massive MIMO, while the other low-complexity methods degrade the estimation accuracy seriously. In this paper, we develop a novel rank-1 subspace channel estimator to approximate the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator, which outperforms the linear MMSE estimator, but incurs a surprisingly low computational complexity. Our method first acquires the highly accurate angle-of-arrival (AoA) information via a constructed space-embedding matrix and the rank-1 subspace method. Then, it adopts thepost-receptionbeamforming to acquire the unbiased estimate of channel gains. Furthermore, a fast method is designed to implement our new estimator. Theoretical analysis shows that the extra gain achieved by our method over the linear MMSE estimator grows according to the rule of O(log10M), while its computational complexity islinearlyscalable to the number of antennasM. Numerical simulations also validate the theoretical results. Our new method substantially extends the accuracy-complexity region and constitutes a promising channel estimation solution to the emerging massive MIMO communications.

Abstract Accurate channel state information (CSI) is extremely crucial to realize high‐accurate hybrid precoding, in millimeter wave communication systems. In order to improve the CSI estimation performance, several traditional channel estimators have been developed by exploiting the sparse or low‐rank property, whilst they bring huge channel training overhead and computational complexity. In this work, based on jointly sparse and low‐rank property of massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) channel, one non‐convex mmWave channel estimation problem is formulated and a novel scheme to acquire one accurate CSI estimation result with greatly reduced training overhead is proposed. Specifically, the non‐convex problem is reformulated as two simple sub‐problems, by exploiting the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) technique. Based on the low‐rank characteristic, one fast gradient descent matrix completion algorithm is developed to accurately solve the first sub‐problem. On this basis, the compressed sensing (CS) technique to acquire the accurate CSI estimation matrix is further utilized. Numerical simulation validates that the method could achieve the much higher channel estimation accuracy, yet only incurs the lower overhead compared with the traditional scheme.