Cell Subarray for XL-MIMO: Undersampling Channel Estimation Exploring Spatial Geometry

To reduce the computational complexity of near-field channel estimation for extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) systems, the concept of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">virtual cell subarrays</i> in subarray hybrid precoding architectures, is firstly given. Multiple subarrays with strong correlation can be flexibly and dynamically combined, to jointly extract relevant features of the channels. Based on this, an undersampling matching and oversampling refinement pursuit (UMORP) algorithm is proposed, which can detect the channel parameters of cell subarrays through an undersampling dictionary constructed by analog phase shifters. This approach facilitates the estimation of the channel of a single cell subarray with much fewer pilots and lower hardware capability requirement. Then, a multiple-path decoupled spatial extrapolation (MPDSE) scheme is proposed for fully dimensional channel reconstruction, which orthogonally decouples multiple paths from the received signal of a single cell subarray firstly, and then utilize the spatial correlation between adjacent cell subarrays to extrapolate the channels with low cost. Moreover, to further reduce the computational complexity in XL-MIMO systems, a spatial multiple cell subarrays joint extrapolation (SMCJE) scheme is also proposed. Based on the spatial geometry among cell subarrays, only several cell suabrrays are utilized to jointly estimate the distances and reconstruct the fully dimensional near-field channel, achieving a low level of computational complexity. Our simulation results verify that the proposed schemes perform better in XL-MIMO systems, while requiring fewer pilots and exhibiting much lower computational complexity.