Performance Analysis of Channel Estimation for Massive MIMO Communication Using DL-Based Fully Connected Neural Network (DL-FCNN) Architecture

The latest research for applying deep learning in wireless communications gives several opportunities to reduce complex signal processing. The channel estimation is important to study the nature of the varying channel and to calculate channel state information (CSI) value which is utilized at the receiver to nullify the interference which occurs during multi-path transmission. In the current article, considering the massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) channel model, a DL approach is developed with a fully connected neural network (NN) architecture which is used to estimate the channel with minimum error. The proposed DL architecture uses an openly available channel dataset. Further, using generated pilot symbols of lengths 2 and 4, the performance of DL-based Fully connected NN (DL-FCNN) is analyzed to estimate the channel in uplink massive MIMO communication. The obtained results demonstrate that the channel estimation performance was calculated in terms of normalized mean square error((NMSE) for different values of SNR added at receiver base station (BS) to the signals over the range of BS antennas. Also, the channel estimation error over a large number of BS antennas for massive MIMO scenarios is observed, and it is observed that the NMSE reduces with a greater number of antennas. Hence, it can be inferred that the DL models will be the future for most physical layer signal processing techniques such as channel estimation, modulation detection, etc. within massive MIMO networks.