Rank-1 Matrix Approximation-Based Channel Estimation for Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Multi-User MISO Communications

Abstract

The acquisition of channel state information is an essential step in enabling intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) for wireless communications. In this letter, we introduce a novel procedure to estimate the cascaded channel between the base station (BS), IRS, and users in a multi-user multiple-input single-output system. The common BS-IRS channel, over which all users transmit, is leveraged to decompose the cascaded channel into a series of rank-1 matrices. Low-rank matrix recovery methods are utilized to improve upon the linear minimum mean-squared error estimate of the cascaded channel. A theoretical upper bound for the mean-square error (MSE) of the proposed estimator is derived. Numerical results reveal that the proposed techniques outperform the existing counterparts in terms of the MSE and scale with the number of BS antennas.