Generalized Channel Estimation and User Detection for Massive Connectivity With Mixed-ADC Massive MIMO

Abstract

This paper aims to provide a partial discrete Fourier transform (DFT) pilot sequence assisted joint channel estimation and user activity detection scheme for massive connectivity, in which a large number of devices with sporadic transmission communicate with a base station (BS) in the uplink. The joint channel estimation and device detection problem can be formulated as a compressed sensing single measurement vector or multiple measurement vector (MMV) problem depending on whether the BS is equipped with single or large number of antennas. Due to high hardware cost and power consumption in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, a mixed analog-to-digital converter (ADC) architecture is considered. In order to accommodate a large number of simultaneously transmitting devices, the joint channel estimation and active user detection are formulated as an MMV problem for the massive connectivity scenario; and the proposed GTurbo-MMV algorithm can precisely estimate the channel state information and detect active devices with relatively low overhead. Furthermore, we study the state evolution (SE) for the MMV problem to obtain achievable bounds on channel estimation and device detection performance, in which both the missing and false detection probabilities can be made tend to zero in the massive MIMO regime. The simulation results confirm the theoretical accuracy of our analysis.