Wideband Beamspace Channel Estimation for Millimeter-Wave MIMO Systems Relying on Lens Antenna Arrays

Abstract

Beamspace channel estimation is indispensable for millimeter-wave (mmWave) MIMO systems relying on lens antenna arrays for achieving substantially increased data rates, despite using a small number of radio-frequency (RF) chains. However, most of the existing beamspace channel estimation schemes have been designed for narrowband systems, while the rather scarce wideband solutions tend to assume that the sparse beamspace channel exhibits a common support in the frequency domain, which has a limited validity owing to the effect of beam squint caused by the wide bandwidth in practice. In this paper, we investigate the wideband beamspace channel estimation problem without the common support assumption. Specifically, by exploiting the effect of beam squint, we first prove that each path component of the wideband beamspace channel exhibits a unique frequency-dependent sparse structure. Inspired by this structure, we then propose a successive support detection (SSD)-based beamspace channel estimation scheme, which successively estimates all the sparse path components following the classical idea of successive interference cancellation (SIC). For each path component, its support at different frequencies is jointly estimated to improve the accuracy by utilizing the proved sparse structure, and its influence is removed to estimate the remaining path components. The performance analysis shows that the proposed SSD-based scheme can accurately estimate the wideband beamspace channel at a low complexity. Simulation results verify that the proposed SSD-based scheme enjoys a reduced pilot overhead, and yet achieves an improved channel estimation accuracy.