Channel Estimation for RIS-Aided mmWave Massive MIMO System Using Few-Bit ADCs

Millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (massive MIMO) is one of the most promising technologies for the fifth generation and beyond wireless communication system. However, a large number of antennas incur high power consumption and hardware costs, and high-frequency communications place a heavy burden on the analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) at the base station (BS). Furthermore, it is too costly to equipping each antenna with a high-precision ADC in a large antenna array system. It is promising to adopt low-resolution ADCs to address this problem. In this letter, we investigate the cascaded channel estimation for a mmWave massive MIMO system aided by a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) with the BS equipped with few-bit ADCs. Due to the low-rank property of the cascaded channel, the estimation of the cascaded channel can be formulated as a low-rank matrix completion problem. We introduce the Bayesian optimal inference framework to tackle with the information loss caused by quantization. To implement the estimator and achieve the matrix completion, we use efficient bilinear generalized approximate message passing (BiG-AMP) algorithm. Extensive simulation results verify that our proposed method can accurately estimate the cascaded channel for the RIS-aided mmWave massive MIMO system with low-resolution ADCs.