Decision Aided Uplink Compressive Channel Estimation for Massive MIMO Systems

Thank to the observation that in massive multi-input multi-output systems, the channels associated with different base station antennas may share common sparse support, the significant path delays can be accurately captured by only few pilots, leading to a reduction of pilot overhead. However, when the number of pilots is small, the path gains can not be accurately estimated and this limits the system performance. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose a decision aided compressive sensing based channel estimation scheme, which utilizes the decoded data to refine the channel estimation. This scheme can effectively improve the channel estimation without increasing the length of pilot sequence, which is confirmed by both analyses and simulation results.