Estimation of Time-Varying Channels in Virtual Angular Domain for Massive MIMO Systems

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the problem of channel estimation in virtual angular domain in massive MIMO orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, in the presence of time varying channels. The proposed channel estimator is based on dichotomous coordinate decent joint sparse recovery (DCD-JSR) algorithm, which was well suited for massive MIMO systems with channels static over several OFDM symbols, but it is not accurate for time-varying channels. The estimator proposed in this paper exploits the basis expansion model (BEM) for approximation of the time-variation of the channel and the sparsity of the channel in the virtual angular domain with a common support over OFDM subcarriers and OFDM symbols for joint estimation of the BEM expansion coefficients. It is shown that, when using the Legendre polynomials as the BEM and depending on the normalized Doppler frequency, only a small number of expansion coefficients is required to provide accurate channel estimation.