MMSE Channel Estimation for Two-Port Demodulation Reference Signals in New Radio

TL;DR

This paper introduces MMSE-based channel estimation schemes for two-port demodulation reference signals in 5G NR, improving accuracy over classical methods by utilizing full or partial prior knowledge.

Contribution

It proposes novel MMSE channel estimation schemes (F-MMSE and P-MMSE) for two-port DMRS in NR, enhancing performance over traditional DFT-based methods.

Findings

F-MMSE achieves superior channel estimation accuracy.

P-MMSE performs nearly as well as F-MMSE with less prior knowledge.

Both schemes outperform classical DFT-based estimation.

Abstract

Two-port demodulation reference signals (DMRS) have been employed in new radio (NR) recently. In this paper, we firstly propose a minimum mean square error (MMSE) scheme with full priori knowledge (F-MMSE) to achieve the channel estimation of two-port DMRS in NR. When the two ports are assigned to different users, the full priori knowledge of two ports is not easy to be obtained for one user. Then, we present a MMSE scheme with partial priori knowledge (P-MMSE). Finally, numerical results show that the proposed schemes achieve satisfactory channel estimation performance. Moreover, for both mean square error and bit error ratio metrics, the proposed schemes can achieve better performance compared with the classical discrete Fourier transform based channel estimation. Particularly, P-MMSE scheme delivers almost the same performance compared with F-MMSE scheme by a small amount of prior knowledge.