Integrated Channel Estimation and Sensing for Near-Field ELAA Systems

Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of uplink channel estimation for near-filed orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, where a base station (BS), equipped with an extremely large-scale antenna array (ELAA), serves multiple users over the same time-frequency resource block. A non-orthogonal pilot transmission scheme is considered to accommodate a larger number of users that can be supported by ELAA systems without incurring an excessive amount of training overhead. To facilitate efficient multi-user channel estimation, we express the received signal as a third-order low-rank tensor, which admits a canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) model for line-of-sight (LoS) scenarios and a block term decomposition (BTD) model for non-line-of-sight (NLoS) scenarios. An alternating least squares (ALS) algorithm and a non-linear least squares (NLS) algorithm are employed to perform CPD and BTD, respectively. Channel parameters are then efficiently extracted from the recovered factor matrices. By exploiting the geometry of the propagation paths in the estimated channel, users' positions can be precisely determined in LoS scenarios. Moreover, our uniqueness analysis shows that the proposed tensor-based joint multi-user channel estimation framework is effective even when the number of pilot symbols is much smaller than the number of users, revealing its potential in training overhead reduction. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves markedly higher channel estimation accuracy than compressed sensing (CS)-based approaches.