A Robust Channel Estimation Scheme for 5G Massive MIMO Systems

Channel state information (CSI) feedback in massive MIMO systems is too large due to large pilot overhead. It is due to the large channel matrix dimension which depends on the number of base station (BS) antennas and consumes the majority of scarce radio resources. To solve this problem, we proposed a scheme for efficient CSI acquisition and reduced pilot overhead. It is based on the separation mechanism for the channel matrix. The spatial correlation among multiuser channel matrices in the virtual angular domain is utilized to split the channel matrix. Then, the two parts of the matrix are estimated by deploying the compressed sensing (CS) techniques. This scheme is novel in the sense that the user equipment (UE) directly transmits the received symbols from the BS to the BS, so a joint CSI recovery is performed at the BS. Simulation results show that the proposed channel estimation scheme effectively estimates the channel with reduced pilot overhead and improved performance as compared with the state-of-the-art schemes.