Massive MIMO Channel Subspace Estimation From Low-Dimensional Projections

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Massive MIMO is a variant of multiuser MIMO (Multi-Input Multi-Output) system, where the number of base-station antennas $M$ is very large and generally much larger than the number of spatially multiplexed data streams. Unfortunately, the front-end A/D conversion necessary to drive hundreds of antennas, with a signal bandwidth of 10 to 100 MHz, requires very large sampling bit-rate and power consumption. To reduce complexity, Hybrid Digital-Analog architectures have been proposed. Our work in this paper is motivated by one of such schemes named Joint Spatial Division and Multiplexing (JSDM), where the downlink precoder (resp., uplink linear receiver) is split into product of a baseband linear projection (digital) and an RF reconfigurable beamforming network (analog), such that only $m \ll M$ A/D converters and RF chains is needed. In JSDM, users are grouped according to similarity of their signal subspaces, and these groups are separated by the analog beamforming stage. Further multiplexing gain in each group is achieved using the digital precoder. Therefore, it is apparent that extracting the signal subspace of the $M$ -dim channel vectors from snapshots of $m$ -dim projections , with $m \ll M$ , plays a fundamental role in JSDM implementation. In this paper, we develop efficient subspace estimation algorithms that require sampling only $m=O(2 \sqrt{M})$ antennas and, for a given $p \ll M$ , return a $p$ -dim beamformer (subspace) that has a performance comparable with the best $p$ -dim beamformer designed from the full knowledge of the exact channel covariance matrix. We assess the performance of our proposed estimators both analytically and empirically via numerical simulations.