Channel estimation for reconfigurable intelligent surface assisted wireless communication systems in mobility scenarios

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) can manipulate the wireless propagation environment by smartly adjusting the amplitude/phase in a programmable panel, enjoying the improved performance. The accurate acquisition of the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) in the cascaded RIS chain makes an indispensable contribution to the performance gains. However, it is quite challenging to estimate the CSI in a time-variant scenario due to the limited signal processing capability of the passive elements embedded in a RIS pannel. In this work, a channel estimation scheme for the RIS-assisted wireless communication system is proposed, which is demonstrated to perform well in a time-variant scenario. The cascaded RIS channel is modeled as a state-space model based upon the mobility situations. In addition, to fully exploit the time correlation of channel, Kalman filter is employed by taking the prior information of channels into account. Further, the optimal reflection coefficients are derived according to the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion. Numerical results show that the proposed methods exhibit superior performance if compared with a conventional channel estimation scheme.