Accurate channel estimation is critical for enabling effective directional beamforming and spectrally efficient transmission in beamspace massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. However, conventional model-driven algorithms are derived from idealized mathematical models and typically suffer severe performance degradation under model mismatches caused by complex and nonideal propagation environments. Although data-driven deep learning (DL) approaches can learn channel characteristics from data, they typically require large-scale training datasets and demonstrate limited generalization capability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a model-data hybrid-driven network (MD-HDN) scheme to address the wideband beamspace channel estimation problem. In the MD-HDN scheme, we unfold the vector approximate message passing (VAMP) algorithm into a trainable network, where a novel shrinkage function is introduced to enhance the estimation accuracy. Extensive numerical results confirm that the proposed MD-HDN scheme can significantly outperform existing schemes under various signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and achieve substantial improvements in both estimation accuracy and robustness.
Nie et al. (2026) studied this question.