Channel Estimation in RIS-Enabled mmWave Wireless Systems: A Variational Inference Approach

Channel estimation in reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS)-aided systems is crucial for optimal configuration of the RIS and various downstream tasks such as user localization. In RIS-aided systems, channel estimation involves estimating two channels for the user-RIS (UE-RIS) and RIS-base station (RIS-BS) links. In the literature, two approaches are proposed: (i) cascaded channel estimation where the two channels are collapsed into a single one and estimated using training signals at the BS, and (ii) separate channel estimation that estimates each channel separately either in a passive or semi-passive RIS setting. In this work, we study the separate channel estimation problem in a fully passive RIS-aided millimeter-wave (mmWave) single-user single-input multiple-output (SIMO) communication system. First, we adopt a variational-inference (VI) approach to jointly estimate the UE-RIS and RIS-BS instantaneous channel state information (I-CSI). In particular, auxiliary posterior distributions of the I-CSI are learned through the maximization of the evidence lower bound. However, estimating the I-CSI for both links in every coherence block results in a high signaling overhead to control the RIS in scenarios with highly mobile users. Thus, we extend our first approach to estimate the slow-varying statistical CSI of the UE-RIS link overcoming the highly variant I-CSI. Precisely, our second method estimates the I-CSI of RIS-BS channel and the UE-RIS channel covariance matrix (CCM) directly from the uplink training signals in a fully passive RIS-aided system. The simulation results demonstrate that using maximum a posteriori channel estimation using the auxiliary posteriors can provide a capacity that approaches the capacity with perfect CSI. Leveraging the UE-RIS CCM enhances spectral efficiency by minimizing the training overhead required to control the RIS, and exploiting its low-rank structure reduces training overhead compared to the maximum likelihood estimator.