Randomized Low-Rank Approximation Based Massive MIMO CSI Compression

Abstract

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is regarded as one enabling technique to improve channel capacity and energy/spectrum efficiency of 5G communications. To attain such potential benefits, accurate channel information is critical to the transmitter, which yet remains a challenging task for frequency division duplexing (FDD) systems, i.e., the channel state information (CSI) feedback tends to be resource-demanding especially for massive MIMO communications. In this work, we propose a novel CSI feedback method with low complexity and high precision, which is inspired by randomized matrix approximation. Our approach exploits the inherent low-rank characteristic of a large channel matrix, and approximates it by small sub-matrices which are then reported to transmitter to recover a CSI matrix. Theoretical bounds of the recovered CSI in both error-free and error cases are derived. Simulation results demonstrate our method could recover CSI accurately via an extremely low complexity and yet achieve a largely reduced compression ratio (or feedback overhead), compared to other schemes. It thus has the great potential in the emerging massive MIMO FDD communications.