Channel Estimation for mmWave Massive MIMO Systems With Mixed-ADC Architecture

Abstract

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications are widely preferred due to the rich bandwidth and potentially huge spectrum resources. Nowadays, mixed-ADC architecture combined with mmWave massive MIMO has become a communication mainstream, which can effectively solve the issue of high total power consumption and cost of base station (BS) circuits. However, the channel estimation problem for mmWave massive MIMO systems with mixed-ADC architecture has not been studied yet. In this paper, we develop the sparse channel estimation method on this framework. Specifically, by exploiting the sparsity of mmWave channels, the beamspace channel estimation problem can be transformed into a sparse matrix recovery problem, the channel parameters are recovered using compressive sensing (CS) techniques. Simulation results show that the algorithms quantized by the mixed-ADC outperforms the low-resolution ADC, and the best performance can be achieved when the low-resolution ADC in the mixed-ADC architecture reaches five-bit.