Beam-blocked compressive channel estimation for FDD massive MIMO systems

To fully exploit the spatial multiplexing gains and array gains of massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO), the channel state information must be obtained accurately at the transmitter side (CSIT). However, conventional channel estimation solutions are not suitable for Frequency-Division Duplexing (FDD) multi-user massive MIMO systems, due to overwhelming pilot and feedback overhead. In this paper, We find that part of the user channels tend to exhibit an approximate beam-blocked sparsity. To exploit this property, we propose a novel blocked compressive channel estimation scheme based on user grouping to reduce the pilot and feedback overhead. More specifically, we adopt user grouping by making the users in one group have similar channel covariance, which makes the channels in one group exhibit beam block sparsity. Then users feed the compressed measurements back to BS and the BS performs the CSIT recovery. Using the beam block sparsity, an optimal block orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm (OBOMP) is developed which effectively recovers the channel parameters. Numerous simulation results demonstrate our proposed scheme outperforms conventional solutions.