Can Channels be Fully Inferred Between Two Antenna Panels?

Abstract: This letter considers a two-panel massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system, where the base station (BS) is equipped with two antenna panels that may use different frequency bands for communication. By exploiting the geometric relationships between antenna panels, efficient channel inference methods across antenna panels are proposed to reduce the overhead of real-time channel estimation. Four scenarios are considered, namely far-field free-space, near-field free-space, multi-path sharing far-field scatterers, and multi-path sharing near-field scatterers. For both far-field and near-field free-space scenarios, we show that the channel of one panel can be fully inferred from that of the other panel, as long as the multi-path components (MPCs) composing the channel can be resolved. On the other hand, for the multi-path scenarios sharing far-field or near-field scatterers, only the angles or range of angles of the MPCs can be inferred, respectively. Simulation results based on commercial 3D ray-tracing software are presented to validate our developed channel inference techniques.