Low Complexity and High Accuracy Channel Interpolation with Dividing URA into Small URAs for 3D Massive MIMO

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is a technology that uses many antennas at base station (BS), and can realize advanced beamforming and spatial multiplexing. However, since Massive MIMO has many antennas, there exist problems such as the increase of overhead including pilot signals used for channel estimation and feedback of channel state information (CSI). To reduce the overhead, there is a technique of transmitting pilot signals only from some antennas and obtaining channels of the remaining antennas by the minimum mean square error (MMSE) interpolation based on spatial correlation. In addition, to perform the MMSE interpolation with low computational complexity, there is a method of interpolating channels by dividing the uniform rectangular antenna array (URA) into the vertical and horizontal linear directions. However, there is a problem that channel interpolation accuracy becomes low with dividing into the linear arrays. In this paper, we propose a method of channel interpolation with dividing the entire URA into a set of smaller URAs where interpolation is performed in each URA. Through computer simulation we show that the proposed method reduces the computational complexity compared with that without dividing, and improves the channel interpolation accuracy compared with that with dividing into linear arrays.