Channel Estimation for Wideband MmWave MIMO OFDM System Exploiting Block Sparsity

Abstract: In this letter, we investigate time-domain channel estimation for wideband millimeter wave (mmWave) MIMO OFDM system. By transmitting frequency-domain pilot symbols as well as different beamforming vectors, we observe that the time-domain mmWave MIMO channels exhibit channel delay sparsity and especially block sparsity among different spatial directions. Then we propose a time-domain channel estimation exploiting block sparsity (TDCEBS) scheme, which always aims at finding the best nonzero block achieving the largest projection of the residue at each iterations. In particular, we evaluate the system performance using the QuaDRiGa which is recommended by 5G New Radio to generate wideband mmWave MIMO channels. The effectiveness of the proposed TDCEBS scheme is verified by the simulation results, as the proposed scheme outperforms the existing schemes.