A Hybrid Pilot Beamforming and Channel Tracking Scheme for Massive MIMO Systems

Abstract

In massive MIMO systems, the effective channel state information (CSI) is an essential prerequisite for the beamforming (BF) design. While there is a handful of previously proposed compressive sensing (CS)-based channel estimation algorithms in the literature, the large BF gain provided by the massive MIMO array has not been fully exploited in the channel estimation stage. In order to obtain higher BF gain and better estimation performance with less pilot overhead, we study the joint design of the transmitting and receiving hybrid pilot BF as well as the associated channel tracking scheme. Specifically, a Markov prior is used to model the temporal correlation in massive MIMO channels over different time slots. Then, the hybrid pilot BF is optimized by maximizing the mutual information between the channel measurements and the corresponding downlink sparse channels with the Markov prior. Following, we derive an efficient channel tracking algorithm called Turbo Bayesian Inference (Turbo-BI) to solve the resulting CS problem and generate the channel prior information required to calculate the mutual information for the optimization of hybrid pilot BF in the next time slot. The proposed Turbo-BI can exploit both the sparsity and the temporal correlation of massive MIMO channels to enhance the estimation performance. Finally, simulations show that our proposed algorithm can achieve significant gain over the existing state-of-the-art baselines.