Time-Varying Downlink Channel Tracking for Quantized Massive MIMO Networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a Bayesian downlink channel estimation framework for time-varying massive MIMO networks. In particular, the quantization effects at the receiver are considered. In order to fully exploit the sparsity and time correlations of channels, we formulate the time-varying massive MIMO channel as the simultaneously sparse signal model. Then, we propose a sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) framework to estimate the model parameters of the sparse virtual channel. The expectation maximization (EM) algorithm is employed to reduce complexity. Specifically, the factor graph and the general approximate message passing (GAMP) algorithms are used to compute the desired posterior statistics in the expectation step, so that high-dimensional integrals over the marginal distributions can be avoided. The non-zero supporting vector of the virtual channel is then obtained from channel statistics by a k-means clustering algorithm. After that, the reduced dimensional GAMP-based scheme is designed to make the full use of the channel temporal correlation so as to enhance the virtual channel tracking accuracy. Finally, the efficacy of the proposed framework is demonstrated through simulations.