Downlink Channel Reconstruction for Massive MIMO Spatial Multiplexing

Time division duplexing (TDD) is adopted to exploit the uplink and downlink channel reciprocity in most of studies on massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. However, even in TDD, a base station (BS) still requires to transmit downlink training signals, which are named in the 3GPP standard as channel state information reference signals (CSI-RSs), to fully support spatial multiplexing in practice. This is because user equipments (UEs) may deploy less number of transmit antennas than receive antennas due to practical issues. Since uplink sounding reference signals (SRSs) are transmitted from only the transmit antennas of the UE, the BS is not able to obtain full downlink MIMO CSI by using channel reciprocity for spatial multiplexing. Hence, after reception of the downlink CSI-RSs, the UE still needs to feed back quantized CSI using a codebook to support spatial multiplexing. Taking practical antenna structures into account for reducing downlink CSI-RS overhead, this paper proposes possible approaches for downlink MIMO CSI reconstruction at the BS using the SRS with quantized downlink CSI to support spatial multiplexing. Numerical results show that the proposed techniques outperform the conventional one, i.e., solely based on the quantized CSI, in terms of the spectral efficiencies of spatial multiplexing.