Blind SNR Estimation and Nonparametric Channel Denoising in Multi-Antenna mmWave Systems

Abstract: We propose blind estimators for the average noise power, receive signal power, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and mean-square error (MSE), suitable for multi-antenna millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless systems. The proposed estimators can be computed at low complexity and solely rely on beamspace sparsity, i.e., the fact that only a small number of dominant propagation paths exist in typical mmWave channels. Our estimators can be used (i) to quickly track some of the key quantities in multi-antenna mmWave systems while avoiding additional pilot overhead and (ii) to design efficient nonparametric algorithms that require such quantities. We provide a theoretical analysis of the proposed estimators, and we demonstrate their efficacy via synthetic experiments and using a nonparametric channel-vector denoising task with realistic multi-antenna mmWave channels.