Spectrum-efficiency parametric channel estimation scheme for massive MIMO systems

This paper proposes a parametric channel estimation method for massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems, whereby the spatial correlation of wireless channels is exploited. For outdoor communication scenarios, most wireless channels are sparse. Meanwhile, compared with the long signal transmission distance, scale of the transmit antenna array can be negligible. Therefore, channel impulse responses (CIRs) associated with different transmit antennas usually share the very similar path delays, since channels of different transmit-receive pairs share the very similar scatterers. By exploiting the spatial common sparsity of wireless MIMO channels, we propose a parametric channel estimation method, whereby the frequency-domain pilots can be reduced significantly. The proposed method can achieve super-resolution path delays, and improve the accuracy of the channel estimation considerably. More interestingly, simulation results indicate that the required average pilot number per transmit antenna even decreases when the number of transmit antennas increases in practice.