Channel Estimation for Wireless Communication Systems Assisted by Large Intelligent Surfaces

In this letter, the channel estimation problem is studied for wireless communication systems assisted by large intelligent surface. Due to features of assistant channel, channel estimation (CE) problem for the investigated system is shown as a constrained estimation error minimization problem, which differs from traditional CE problems. A Lagrange multiplier and dual ascent-based estimation scheme is then designed to obtain a closed-form solution for the estimator iteratively. Moreover, the Cramer-Rao lower bounds are deduced for performance evaluation. Simulation results show that the designed scheme could improve estimation accuracy up to 18%, compared with least square method in low signal-to-noise ratio regime.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, journa

Channel Estimation for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Wireless Communications

In this paper, the minimum mean square error (MMSE) channel estimation for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted wireless communication systems is investigated. In the considered setting, each row vector of the equivalent channel matrix from the base station (BS) to the users is shown to be Bessel $K$ distributed, and all these row vectors are independent of each other. By introducing a Gaussian scale mixture model, we obtain a closed-form expression for the MMSE estimate of the equivalent channel, and determine analytical upper and lower bounds on the mean square error. Using the central limit theorem, we conduct an asymptotic analysis of the MMSE estimate, and show that the upper bound on the mean square error of the MMSE estimate is equal to the asymptotic mean square error of the MMSE estimation when the number of reflecting elements at the IRS tends to infinity. Numerical simulations show that the gap between the upper and lower bounds are very small, and they almost overlap with each other at medium signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels and moderate number of elements at the IRS.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, conference pape

Beyond Max-SNR: Joint Encoding for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

A communication link aided by a Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) is studied, in which the transmitter can control the state of the RIS via a finite-rate control link. Prior work mostly assumed a fixed RIS configuration irrespective of the transmitted information. In contrast, this work derives information-theoretic limits, and demonstrates that the capacity is achieved by a scheme that jointly encodes information in the transmitted signal as well as in the RIS configuration. In addition, a novel signaling strategy based on layered encoding is proposed that enables practical successive cancellation-type decoding at the receiver. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the standard max-SNR scheme that fixes the configuration of the RIS as to maximize the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) at the receiver is strictly suboptimal, and is outperformed by the proposed strategies at all practical SNR levels.Comment: To be submitted for conference publicatio

Channel Estimation for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Multiuser Communications: Framework, Algorithms, and Analysis

In intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted communication systems, the acquisition of channel state information (CSI) is a crucial impediment for achieving the beamforming gain of IRS because of the considerable overhead required for channel estimation. Specifically, under the current beamforming design for IRS-assisted communications, $KMN+KM$ channel coefficients should be estimated, where $K$, $N$ and $M$ denote the numbers of users, IRS reflecting elements, and antennas at the base station (BS), respectively. To accurately estimate such a large number of channel coefficients within a short time interval, we propose a novel three-phase pilot-based channel estimation framework in this paper for IRS-assisted uplink multiuser communications. Under this framework, we analytically prove that a time duration consisting of $K+N+\max(K-1,\lceil (K-1)N/M \rceil)$ pilot symbols is sufficient for the BS to perfectly recover all the $KMN+KM$ channel coefficients for the case without receiver noise at the BS. In contrast to the channel estimation for conventional uplink communications without IRS where the minimum channel estimation time is independent of the number of receive antennas at the BS, our result reveals the crucial role of massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) in reducing the channel estimation time for IRS-assisted communications. Further, for the case with receiver noise, the user pilot sequences, IRS reflecting coefficients, and BS linear minimum mean-squared error (LMMSE) channel estimators are characterized in closed-form, and the corresponding estimation mean-squared error (MSE) is quantified.Comment: accepted by IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1911.0308

Channel Estimation for IRS-aided Multiuser Communications with Reduced Error Propagation

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising paradigm to improve the capacity and reliability of a wireless communication system by smartly reconfiguring the wireless propagation environment. To achieve the promising gains of IRS, the acquisition of the channel state information (CSI) is essential, which however is practically difficult since the IRS does not employ any transmit/receive radio frequency (RF) chains in general and it has limited signal processing capability. In this paper, we study the uplink channel estimation problem for an IRS-aided multiuser single-input multi-output (SIMO) system, and propose a novel two-phase channel estimation (2PCE) strategy which can alleviate the negative effects caused by error propagation in the existing three-phase channel estimation approach, i.e., the channel estimation errors in previous phases will deteriorate the estimation performance in later phases, and enhance the channel estimation performance with the same amount of channel training overhead as in the existing approach. Moreover, the asymptotic mean squared error (MSE) of the 2PCE strategy is analyzed when the least-square (LS) channel estimation method is employed, and we show that the 2PCE strategy can outperform the existing approach. Finally, extensive simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the 2PCE strategy