Compressive Sensing-Based Underground Channel Estimation Operating in Millimetter-Wave Band

Propagation in underground mine environment, especially for millimeter-Wave (mm-Wave) band is envisioned as one of the most challenging communication systems. An efficient channel estimation is made critical for 60 GHz communications, because this, high-resolution step can significantly enhance the stability and the data rates of the communication system. This paper investigates a promising compressed sensing (CS) based underground channel estimation scheme in time domain for 2 x 2 multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system operating in the 60 GHz band. Motivated by the observation that the mm-Wave channel is prone to exhibit sparsity, this architecture is applied on channel measurements which are performed in real MIMO underground mine environments, by skillfully designing the pilots within the frame. This work is considered to be the first investigation that estimated the underground radio channel based on real-world propagation measurements at this band. We have retained the conventional least squares (LS) as the benchmark to show that the CS estimator technique achieves a higher estimation accuracy than the former in terms of both the normalized mean square error (NMSE) and the bit error rate (BER).