Lower Performance Bound for Beamspace Channel Estimation in Massive MIMO

Abstract

In this letter, we present a lower performance bound for discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-based beamspace channel estimation (CE) in 64 antennas Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) receiver. The beamspace CE is implemented after antennas digital signal transformation to a priori estimated DFT sub-space resulting in less complexity. To estimate the performance, we calculate noise power after the beamspace CE unit by decomposing an ideal channel response into separate taps and transforming them into the beam domain. Then the minimum mean squared error (MMSE) method is employed with taps to estimate the CE error power. An artificial CE is calculated as a sum of the ideal beamspace channel and additive Gaussian noise with the same error power. The artificial CE is utilized in the MIMO detector and decoder to achieve performance bound. Simulation results are presented for the non-line-of-sight model of the 5G QuaDRiGa 2.0 channel.