A Deep Learning-based Approach to 5G-New Radio Channel Estimation

In this paper, we present a deep learning-based technique for channel estimation. By treating the time-frequency grid of the channel response as a low-resolution 2D-image, we propose a 5G-New Radio Convolutional Neural Network, called NR-ChannelNet, which can be properly trained to predict the channel coefficients. Our study employs a 3GPP-compliant 5G-New Radio simulator that can reproduce a realistic scenario by including multiple transmitting/receiving antenna schemes and clustered delay line channel model. Simulation results show that our deep learning approach can achieve competitive performance with respect to traditional techniques such as 2D-MMSE: indeed, under certain conditions, our new NR-ChannelNet approach achieves remarkable gains in terms of throughput.