Low-Rank Channel Estimation for Millimeter Wave and Terahertz Hybrid MIMO Systems

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is one of the fundamental technologies for 5G and beyond. The increased number of antenna elements at both the transmitter and the receiver translates into a large-dimension channel matrix. In addition, the power requirements for the massive MIMO systems are high, especially when fully digital transceivers are deployed. To address this challenge, hybrid analog-digital transceivers are considered a viable alternative. However, for hybrid systems, the number of observations during each channel use is reduced. The high dimensions of the channel matrix and the reduced number of observations make the channel estimation task challenging. Thus, channel estimation may require increased training overhead and higher computational complexity. The need for high data rates is increasing rapidly, forcing a shift of wireless communication towards higher frequency bands such as millimeter Wave (mmWave) and terahertz (THz). The wireless channel at these bands is comprised of only a few dominant paths. This makes the channel sparse in the angular domain and the resulting channel matrix has a low rank. This thesis aims to provide channel estimation solutions benefiting from the low rankness and sparse nature of the channel. The motivation behind this thesis is to offer a desirable trade-off between training overhead and computational complexity while providing a desirable estimate of the channel

Low-Rank Matrix Sensing-Based Channel Estimation for mmWave and THz Hybrid MIMO Systems

This paper studies the channel estimation for wideband multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems equipped with hybrid analog/digital transceivers operating in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) or terahertz (THz) bands. By exploiting the low-rank property of the concatenated channel matrix of the delay taps, we formulate the channel estimation problem as a low-rank matrix sensing (LRMS) problem and solve it using a low-complexity generalized conditional gradient-alternating minimization (GCG-ALTMIN) algorithm. This LRMS-based solution can accommodate different precoder/combiner and training structures. In addition, it does not require knowledge about the array responses at the transceivers, in contrast to most existing solutions allowing low training overhead. Furthermore, a preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) algorithm-based implementation and a low-rank matrix completion (LRMC) formulation are proposed to further reduce the computational complexity. In order to enhance the channel estimation performance for fat and tall channel matrices, we introduce a matrix reshaping approach that can preserve the channel rank by exploiting the shift-invariance property of uniform arrays. We also introduce a spectrum denoising (SD) approach for further improving the performance when the array responses are known and the number of paths is small. These approaches can effectively enhance the performance at a given training overhead. Simulation results suggest that the proposed solutions can achieve higher channel estimation accuracy and reduce the computational complexity as compared to several representative channel estimation schemes