Beam Pattern and Reflection Pattern Design for Channel Estimation in RIS-Assisted mmWave MIMO Systems

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a revolutionary technology that can be applied in millimeter wave (mmWave) communications to reduce the high power consumption and propagation loss. However, channel estimation (CE) is challenging due to the large number of passive RIS elements without signal processing abilities. In this paper, the uplink CE for RIS-assisted mmWave multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems is formulated as a sparse signal recovery problem in a novel way. Then, the beam pattern and reflection pattern design based on the compressed sensing (CS) theory are proposed to guarantee the efficient CE. Simulation results demonstrate that, for various CS-based CE algorithms, the proposed patterns can reduce more than 50% pilot overhead at 0 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) while maintaining the same accuracy of CE compared with the existing patterns.