Iterative Channel Estimation Using LSE and Sparse Message Passing for MmWave MIMO Systems

We propose an iterative channel estimation algorithm based on the least square estimation (LSE) and sparse message passing (SMP) algorithm for the millimeter wave (mmWave) MIMO systems. The channel coefficients of the mmWave MIMO are approximately modeled as a Bernoulli–Gaussian distribution and the channel matrix is sparse with only a few nonzero entries. By leveraging the advantage of sparseness, we propose an algorithm that iteratively detects the exact locations and values of nonzero entries of the sparse channel matrix. At each iteration, the locations are detected by the SMP, and values are estimated with the LSE. We also analyze the Cramér–Rao Lower Bound (CLRB), and show that the proposed algorithm is a minimum variance unbiased estimator under the assumption that we have the partial priori knowledge of the channel. Furthermore, we employ the Gaussian approximation for message densities under density evolution to simplify the analysis of the algorithm, which provides a simple method to predict the performance of the proposed algorithm. Numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithm has much better performance than the existing sparse estimators, especially when the channel is sparse. In addition, our proposed algorithm converges to the CRLB of the genie-aided estimation of sparse channels with only five turbo iterations.