Channel Estimation for Millimeter Wave Massive MIMO Systems with Low-Resolution ADCs

Channel estimation is very challenging for millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) owing to the severe nonlinear distortion introduced by quantization. In this paper, we develop an advanced channel estimation method based on generalized expectation consistent signal recovery (GEC-SR) algorithm, which can obtain accurate channel state information from quantized signal. Specifically, we consider Laplacian prior to model angular domain mmWave channel coefficients and embed the expectation-maximization (EM) principle into GEC-SR algorithm to learn the unknown prior parameters. Numerical results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art generalized-approximate-message-passing-based channel estimator, and can reduce the required pilot overhead significantly by using orthogonal pilot.