Channel Tracking for RIS-aided mmWave Communications Under High Mobility Scenarios

TL;DR

This paper proposes a practical and robust channel tracking scheme for RIS-assisted mmWave communications in high mobility scenarios, improving accuracy and applicability over existing methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel channel tracking method based on cascaded angles and non-Gaussian noise, enhancing practicality and robustness in high mobility environments.

Findings

High tracking accuracy demonstrated in simulations

Outperforms existing EKF-based schemes

Effective under non-Gaussian noise conditions

Abstract

The emerging reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) technology is promising for applications in the millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems to effectively compensate for propagation loss or tackle the blockage issue. Considering the high mobility of users in realistic scenarios, it is essential to adjust the phase shifts in real time to align the beam towards the mobile users, which requires to frequently estimate the channel state information. Hence, it is imperative to design efficient channel tracking schemes to avoid the complex channel estimation procedure. In this paper, we develop a novel channel tracking scheme with two advantages over conventional schemes. First, our tracking scheme is based on the cascaded angles at the RIS instead of the accurate angle values, which is more practical. Second, it can be employed under a more general setting where the noise can be non-Gaussian. Simulation results show the high tracking accuracy of our proposed scheme, and validate the superiority to the existing EKF-based tracking scheme.