Power Distribution Based Beamspace Channel Estimation for mmWave Massive MIMO System With Lens Antenna Array

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with lens antenna array can achieve extremely high data rates with limited radio frequency (RF) chains. It brings challenges to channel estimation due to the gap between the number of RF chains and antennas. To solve this problem, by analyzing and exploiting the unique power distribution (PD) of the beamspace channel (BC) that differs from the general sparse signals, we propose a PD-based estimation scheme for the sparse BC. Specifically, we transform the issue into the direction of arrival (DOA) and complex gain estimation for each multipath component after PD-based support estimation. Meanwhile, we propose a method to reduce error propagation. Besides, we provide a lower bound for the error of the proposed PD-based scheme and explain the parameters that influence the performance. Finally, the numerical simulation results confirm the advantage of the proposed method over the conventional channel estimation ones in terms of accuracy and overhead. Meanwhile, the simulation results also prove the proposed proposition about the lower bound of normalized mean squared error.