Channel Modeling and Channel Estimation for Holographic Massive MIMO with Planar Arrays

TL;DR

This paper develops a realistic channel model for holographic massive MIMO with planar arrays considering non-isotropic scattering and directive antennas, and proposes a geometry-based channel estimation scheme that outperforms traditional LS methods.

Contribution

It introduces a new channel model for holographic massive MIMO and a geometry-based estimation method that reduces complexity and improves accuracy without prior channel statistics.

Findings

The proposed estimator outperforms LS in accuracy.

A new channel model accounts for non-isotropic scattering.

The estimation scheme exploits array geometry for reduced-rank subspace identification.

Abstract

In a realistic wireless environment, the multi-antenna channel usually exhibits spatially correlation fading. This is more emphasized when a large number of antennas is densely deployed, known as holographic massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output). In the first part of this letter, we develop a channel model for holographic massive MIMO by considering both non-isotropic scattering and directive antennas. With a large number of antennas, it is difficult to obtain full knowledge of the spatial correlation matrix. In this case, channel estimation is conventionally done using the least-squares (LS) estimator that requires no prior information of the channel statistics or array geometry. In the second part of this letter, we propose a novel channel estimation scheme that exploits the array geometry to identify a subspace of reduced rank that covers the eigenspace of any spatial correlation matrix. The proposed estimator outperforms the LS estimator, without using any user-specific channel statistics.