Channel Estimation for Downlink Communications Based on Dynamic Metasurface Antennas

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel, data-aided channel estimation method for DMA-based MISO-OFDM systems that separately estimates the wireless channel and waveguide vector using PARAFAC decomposition, enabling effective beamforming.

Contribution

It presents the first channel estimation approach for DMAs that jointly estimates channel and waveguide effects without sequential pilot-data stages.

Findings

The proposed scheme achieves accurate channel and waveguide vector estimates.

Numerical results show notable performance improvements.

The method operates independently of the wireless channel's fast variations.

Abstract

Dynamic metasurface antennas (DMAs) are emerging as a promising technology to enable energy-efficient, large array-based multi-antenna systems. This paper presents a simple channel estimation scheme for the downlink of a multiple-input single-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MISO-OFDM) communication system exploiting DMAs. The proposed scheme extracts separate estimates of the wireless channel and the unknown waveguide propagation vector using a simple iterative algorithm based on the parallel factor (PARAFAC) decomposition. Obtaining decoupled estimates of the wireless channel and inner waveguide vector enables the isolation and compensation for its effect when designing the DMA beamformer, regardless of the wireless channel state, which evolves much faster due to its shorter coherence time and bandwidth. Additionally, our solution operates in a data-aided manner, delivering estimates of useful data symbols jointly with channel estimates, without requiring sequential pilot and data stages. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explore this CE approach. Numerical results corroborate the notable performance of the proposed scheme.