Exploiting angular spread in channel estimation of millimeter wave MIMO system

Millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency spectrum can mitigate severe spectrum shortage caused by the explosive growth of mobile data demand. To overcome the high propagation loss of mmWave signals, massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) and hybrid architecture are employed. As in microwave communication systems, channel state information (CSI) is essential to fully achieve the advantages of mmWave communication. However, due to the massive number of antennas and hybrid architecture, the CSI acquisition is challenging. The sparsity of mmWave channel can be utilized to reduce the training overhead. In addition to sparsity, real-world measurements in dense urban propagation environments reveal that the mmWave channel may spread in form of cluster of paths over the angular domains, namely the angular spread. In this paper, it is utilized to formulate the channel estimation as a block-sparse signal recovery problem. The block orthogonal matching pursuit (BOMP) is used to validate the model. Then, block fast Bayesian matching pursuit (BFBMP) algorithm is proposed to solve the above problem. Compared with other existing channel estimation methods, simulation results show that the angular spread feature and the proposed BFBMP can considerably improve the CSI estimation with less complexity.