Angle Domain Channel Estimation in Hybrid Millimeter Wave Massive MIMO Systems

This paper proposes a novel direction-of-arrival (DOA)-aided channel estimation for a hybrid millimeter-wave (mm-wave) massive multiple-input multiple-output system with a uniform planar array at the base station. To explore the physical characteristics of the antenna array in mm-wave systems, the parameters of each channel path are decomposed into the DOA information and the channel gain information. We first estimate the initial DOAs of each uplink path through the 2-D discrete Fourier transform and enhance the estimation accuracy via the angle rotation technique. We then estimate the channel gain information using a small amount of training resources, which significantly reduces the training overhead and the feedback cost. More importantly, to examine the estimation performance, we derive the theoretical bounds of the mean squared errors (MSEs) and the Cramér-Rao lower bounds (CRLBs) of the joint DOA and channel gain estimation. The simulation results show that the performances of the proposed methods are close to the theoretical MSEs' analysis. Furthermore, the theoretical MSEs are also close to the corresponding CRLBs.