Orthogonal Projection-Based Channel Estimation for Multi-Panel Millimeter Wave MIMO

Abstract

Multi-panel MIMO is a promising technology in millimeter wave communications. Due to its partially hybrid structure and non-uniform antenna array, existing channel estimation cannot be directly applied to multi-panel MIMO. In this paper, we study channel estimation for multi-panel mmWave MIMO. We firstly model channel estimation of multi-panel MIMO as a block-sparse signal recovery problem. Then, according to maximum likelihood criterion, we propose an orthogonal projection method to firstly detect the support of the sparse channel response vector and then perform least square estimation, based on which we also propose a low-complexity greedy support detection in order to reduce computational complexity. Finally, through analyzing pairwise error probability of support detection, we verify the performance gain of joint multi-panel channel estimation over single panel channel estimation, and we further find that joint multi-panel channel estimation with independently generated random combining matrices outperforms that with identically generated combining matrices. Numerical results verify the superiority of our proposed joint multi-panel orthogonal projection based channel estimation over existing schemes.