Frequency-domain Compressive Channel Estimation for Frequency-Selective Hybrid mmWave MIMO Systems

Channel estimation is useful in millimeter wave (mmWave) MIMO communication systems. Channel state information allows optimized designs of precoders and combiners under different metrics such as mutual information or signal-to-interference-noise (SINR) ratio. At mmWave, MIMO precoders and combiners are usually hybrid, since this architecture provides a means to trade-off power consumption and achievable rate. Channel estimation is challenging when using these architectures, however, since there is no direct access to the outputs of the different antenna elements in the array. The MIMO channel can only be observed through the analog combining network, which acts as a compression stage of the received signal. Most of prior work on channel estimation for hybrid architectures assumes a frequency-flat mmWave channel model. In this paper, we consider a frequency-selective mmWave channel and propose compressed-sensing-based strategies to estimate the channel in the frequency domain. We evaluate different algorithms and compute their complexity to expose trade-offs in complexity-overhead-performance as compared to those of previous approaches.