A Deep Learning and Geospatial Data-Based Channel Estimation Technique for Hybrid Massive MIMO Systems

This paper presents a novel channel estimation technique for the multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MU-mMIMO) systems using angular-based hybrid precoding (AB-HP). The proposed channel estimation technique generates group-wise channel state information (CSI) of user terminal (UT) zones in the service area by deep neural networks (DNN) and fuzzy c-Means (FCM) clustering. The slow time-varying CSI between the base station (BS) and feasible UT locations in the service area is calculated from the geospatial data by offline ray tracing and a DNN-based path estimation model associated with the 1-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) and regression tree ensembles. Then, the UT-level CSI of all feasible locations is grouped into clusters by a proposed FCM clustering. Finally, the service area is divided into a number of non-overlapping UT zones. Each UT zone is characterized by a corresponding set of clusters named as UT-group CSI, which is utilized in the analog RF beamformer design of AB-HP to reduce the required large online CSI overhead in the MU-mMIMO systems. Then, the reduced-size online CSI is employed in the baseband (BB) precoder of AB-HP. Simulations are conducted in the indoor scenario at 28 GHz and tested in an AB-HP MU-mMIMO system with a uniform rectangular array (URA) having
$16 \times 16=256$
antennas and 22 RF chains. Illustrative results indicate that 91.4% online CSI can be reduced by using the proposed offline channel estimation technique as compared to the conventional online channel sounding. The proposed DNN-based path estimation technique produces same amount of UT-level CSI with runtime reduced by 65.8% as compared to the computationally expensive ray tracing. The imperfection of UT-level CSI introduced by the DNN-based path estimation technique is mitigated by the FCM clustering technique, where the AB-HP using offline UT-group CSI generated by the DNN-based channel estimation model and ray tracing based model for the RF beamformer achieves, respectively, 98.7% and 99.1% sum-rate performance of the fully digital precoding (FDP) technique using full-size online CSI.