A Unified Channel Estimation Framework for Stationary and Non-Stationary Fading Environments

Abstract

Channel estimation is crucial to modern wireless systems and becomes more and more challenging with the growth of user throughput in sub-6 GHz multiple input multiple output configuration. Plenty of literature spends great efforts in improving the estimation accuracy, while the interpolation schemes are overlooked. To deal with this challenge, we exploit the super-resolution image recovery scheme to model the non-linear interpolation mechanisms. Moreover, in order to extend the estimation scheme into the non-stationary environment which is especially attractive in the coming 6G, we utilize the recurrent network structure to approximate the non-linear channel statistic correlation to model the non-stationary behavior which is difficult to accomplish in the theoretical way. To make it more practical, we offline generate numerical channel coefficients according to the statistical channel models to train the neural networks and directly apply them in different environments. As shown in this paper, the proposed unified super-resolution based channel estimation scheme can outperform the conventional approaches in both stationary and non-stationary scenarios, which we believe can significantly change the current channel estimation method in the near future.