Compressed sensing-based structured joint channel estimation in a multi-user massive MIMO system

Acquisition of accurate channel state information (CSI) at transmitters results in a huge pilot overhead in massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems due to the large number of antennas in the base station (BS). To reduce the overwhelming pilot overhead in such systems, a structured joint channel estimation scheme employing compressed sensing (CS) theory is proposed. Specifically, the channel sparsity in the angular domain due to the practical scattering environment is analyzed, where common sparsity and individual sparsity structures among geographically neighboring users exist in multi-user massive MIMO systems. Then, by equipping each user with multiple antennas, the pilot overhead can be alleviated in the framework of CS and the channel estimation quality can be improved. Moreover, a structured joint matching pursuit (SJMP) algorithm at the BS is proposed to jointly estimate the channel of users with reduced pilot overhead. Furthermore, the probability upper bound of common support recovery and the upper bound of channel estimation quality using the proposed SJMP algorithm are derived. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed SJMP algorithm can achieve a higher system performance than those of existing algorithms in terms of pilot overhead and achievable rate.