The Effect of Multipath Propagation on Performance Limit of mmWave MIMO-Based Position, Orientation and Channel Estimation

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive antenna array has shown great potential in gaining high-accuracy localization for user equipments (UEs). Yet, mmWave signals suffer from non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation and fast time-scale fading in practice, which will affect UE localization performance. It is non-trivial to reveal the impact of multipath propagation and fast time-scale fading on mmWave-based localization, and gain guidelines for harnessing NLOS propagation. In this paper, we aim to provide a unified framework for performance analysis of mmWave-based UE localization and channel estimation. Firstly, closed-form Cramer-Rao lower bounds for UE localization and channel estimation, respectively, are derived to shed lights on their performance limits. Secondly, the effect of system elements (e.g., channel correlation and fast time-scale fading) on UE localization performance is quantitatively analyzed. In addition, information contribution from NLOS channel is quantified to reveal the impact of multipath propagation on UE localization. Finally, we show that the NLOS propagation-caused localization error can be alleviated by using a NLOS model folding-based localization scheme
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, which strikes a balance between computational complexity and localization performance.