Channel Estimation for RIS-Aided Multiuser Millimeter-Wave Systems

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising device that can reconfigure the electromagnetic propagation environment through adjustment of the phase shifts of its reflecting elements. However, channel estimation in RIS-aided multiuser multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) wireless communication systems is challenging due to the passive nature of the RIS and the large number of reflecting elements that can lead to high channel estimation overhead. To address this issue, we propose a novel cascaded channel estimation strategy with low pilot overhead by exploiting the sparsity and the correlation of multiuser cascaded channels in millimeter-wave MISO systems. Based on the fact that the physical positions of the BS, the RIS and users do not appreciably change over multiple consecutive channel coherence blocks, we first estimate the full channel state information (CSI) including all the angle and gain information in the first coherence block, and then only re-estimate the channel gains in the remaining coherence blocks with much lower pilot overhead. In the first coherence block, we propose a two-phase channel estimation method, in which the cascaded channel of one typical user is estimated in Phase I based on the linear correlation among cascaded paths, while the cascaded channels of other users are estimated in Phase II by utilizing the reparameterized CSI of the common base station (BS)-RIS channel obtained in Phase I. The minimum pilot overhead is much less than the existing works. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in terms of the estimation accuracy when using the same amount of pilot overhead.