Estimation and Mitigation of Channel Non-Reciprocity in Massive MIMO

Time-division duplex (TDD)-based massive MIMO systems rely on the reciprocity of the wireless propagation channels when calculating the downlink precoders based on uplink pilots. However, the effective uplink and downlink channels incorporating the analog radio front-ends of the base station (BS) and user equipments (UEs) exhibit non-reciprocity due to non-identical behavior of the individual transmit and receive chains. When the downlink precoder is not aware of such channel non-reciprocity (NRC), system performance can be significantly degraded due to the NRC-induced interference terms. In this paper, we consider a general TDD-based massive MIMO system where frequency-response mismatches at both the BS and UEs, as well as the mutual coupling mismatches at the BS large-antenna system all coexist and induce channel NRC. Based on the NRC-impaired signal models, we first propose a novel iterative estimation method for acquiring both the BS and UE side NRC matrices and then also propose an efficient NRC-aware downlink precoder design which utilizes the obtained estimates. Furthermore, an efficient pilot signaling scheme between the BS and UEs is introduced in order to facilitate executing the proposed estimation method and the NRC-aware precoding technique in practical systems. Comprehensive numerical results indicate substantially improved spectral efficiency performance when the proposed NRC estimation and NRC-aware precoding methods are adopted, compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods.