Grouping-Based Channel Estimation and Tracking for Millimeter Wave Massive MIMO Systems

Although the millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) system can potentially boost the network capacity for future communications, the pilot overhead of the system in practice will greatly increase, which causes a significant decrease in system performance. In this paper, we propose a novel grouping-based channel estimation and tracking approach to reduce the pilot overhead and computational complexity while improving the estimation accuracy. Specifically, we design a low-complexity iterative channel estimation and tracking algorithm by fully exploiting the sparsity of mmWave massive MIMO channels, where the signal eigenvectors are estimated and tracked based on the received signals at the base station (BS). With the recovered signal eigenvectors, the celebrated multiple-signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm can be employed to estimate the direction of arrival (DoA) angles and the path amplitude for the user terminals (UTs). To improve the estimation accuracy and accelerate the tracking speed, we develop a closed-form solution for updating the step-size in the proposed iterative algorithm. Furthermore, a grouping method is proposed to reduce the number of sharing pilots in the scenario of multiple UTs to shorten the pilot overhead. The computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is analyzed. Simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed schemes in terms of the estimation accuracy, tracking speed, and overhead reduction.