A Practical Channel Estimation Strategy for XL-MIMO Communication Systems

Extremely large-scale massive MIMO (XL-MIMO) has been emerged as an innovative technique for future 6G communication. Channel state information (CSI) acquisition is a crucial but challenging task in XL-MIMO wireless systems due to the larger number of base station (BS) antennas. In this letter, we investigate a practical strategy to realize efficient channel estimation for XL-MIMO communication systems with the consideration of hybrid-field channel model. Different from the existing work requiring the specific proportion of the number of far-field and near-field channel paths as a prior knowledge, which is not feasible in practical communications, our method aims to provide a criterion to determine the value of proportion first and then acquire the corresponding estimated channel components. Simulation results show the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed channel estimation method as compared to the benchmarks.