Time-Varying Massive MIMO Channel Estimation: Capturing, Reconstruction, and Restoration

To estimate time-varying MIMO channel at base station, traditional downlink (DL) channel restoration schemes usually require the reconstruction for the covariance of downlink process noise vector, which is dependent on DL channel covariance matrix (CCM). However, the acquisition of the CCM leads to extremely high overhead in massive MIMO systems. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel scheme for DL channel tracking in this paper. First, by utilizing virtual channel representation (VCR), we develop a dynamic uplink (UL) massive MIMO channel model with the consideration of off-grid refinement. Then, a coordinate-wise expectation maximization (EM) algorithm is adopted for capturing model parameters, including the spatial signatures, time-correlation factors, off-grid bias, channel power, and noise power. By exploiting the UL/DL angle reciprocity, the spatial signatures, time-correlation factors and off-grid bias of the DL channel model can be reconstructed with the knowledge of UL. However, channel power and noise power are closely related with the carrier frequency, which cannot be perfectly inferred from the UL. Instead of discovering these two parameters with dedicated training, we resort to the optimal Bayesian Kalman filter (OBKF) method to accurately track the DL channel with partial prior knowledge. At the same time, the model parameters will be gradually restored. Specially, the factor-graph and the Metropolis Hastings MCMC are utilized within the OBKF framework. Finally, numerical results are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed scheme.