Revisiting XL-MIMO Channel Estimation: When Dual-Wideband Effects Meet Near Field

TL;DR

This paper addresses the complex channel estimation challenges in wideband XL-MIMO systems caused by near-field effects and dual-wideband phenomena, proposing a structured sparsity model and a novel Bayesian inference algorithm.

Contribution

It introduces a new hierarchical prior model capturing structured sparsity and develops a hybrid message passing algorithm tailored for wideband XL-MIMO channel estimation.

Findings

The proposed model effectively captures global and local sparsity patterns.

The MMV-HMP algorithm outperforms existing methods in accuracy.

Simulation results confirm the approach's robustness and efficiency.

Abstract

The deployment of extremely large antenna arrays (ELAAs) in extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) systems introduces significant near-field effects, such as spherical wavefront propagation and spatially non-stationary (SnS) properties. When combined with the dual-wideband effects inherent to wideband systems, these phenomena fundamentally alter the channel's sparsity patterns in the angular-delay domain, rendering existing estimation methods insufficient. To address these challenges, this paper reconsiders the channel estimation problem for wideband XL-MIMO systems. Leveraging the spatial-chirp property of array responses, we first quantitatively characterize the angular-delay domain sparsity of wideband XL-MIMO channels, revealing both global block sparsity and local common-delay sparsity. To effectively capture this structured sparsity, we then propose a novel column-wise hierarchical prior model that integrates a precision sharing mechanism and a Markov random field (MRF) structure. Building on this prior model, the channel estimation task is formulated as a multiple measurement vector (MMV)-based Bayesian inference problem. Tailored to the complex factor graph induced by this hierarchical prior, we develop a MMV-based hybrid message passing (MMV-HMP) algorithm. This algorithm performs message updates along the edges of the factor graph, and selectively applies either the variational message passing (VMP) or sum-product (SP) rules, depending on the factor-node structure and message tractability. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed column-wise hierarchical prior model through ablation studies and demonstrate that the MMV-HMP algorithm, while maintaining moderate computational complexity, consistently outperforms existing baselines which fail to capture the structured sparsity of wideband XL-MIMO channels.