Hybrid Channel Estimation for UPA-Assisted Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO IoT Systems

In this article, we present a hybrid channel estimation algorithm for uniform planar array (UPA)-assisted millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) Internet of Things (IoT) systems by exploiting the benefits from both the compressed sensing (CS) and the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL). Compared with existing studies, the distribution characteristics and correlations between propagation paths in the elevation (e)- and azimuth (a)-angle domains are considered to enhance the estimation performance. Specifically, we first redefine the e-angles and the a-angles to simplify the system model. Then, a novel autoregressive (AR)-Gaussian channel prior is proposed to capture both the sparsity and the clustering properties of mmWave massive MIMO IoT channels. After that, we provide a channel approximation method to overcome the channel uncertainty by exploiting the structure of the AR-Gaussian channel prior. The hybrid beamforming (HBF) architecture with limited radio-frequency (RF) chains in mmWave IoT systems is also considered. Finally, we propose a hybrid channel estimation algorithm, which consists of two stages. Based on the different distribution characteristics in different angle domains, the CS-based channel estimation is performed for e-angles on stage one, while the SBL-based channel estimation is applied for a-angles on stage two. Numerical results reveal that compared with the existing CS- and SBL-only methods, the proposed hybrid channel estimation algorithm exhibits better performance in terms of computational complexity, sparsity robustness, and estimation accuracy.