A Compressive Sensing and Deep Learning-Based Time-Varying Channel Estimation for FDD Massive MIMO Systems

To achieve the performance gains of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, the downlink channel state information (CSI) must be acquired at the base station (BS). In frequency division duplexing (FDD) massive MIMO systems, the BS always first transmits downlink pilot symbols so that the user equipment (UE) can estimate CSI and then feedback to the BS. However, the huge number of antennas at the BS will lead to overwhelming feedback overhead. Moreover, time-varying caused by high mobility of user terminals makes the priori channel knowledge of the channels to change from one slot to another so that CSI aquisition is hard. To simultaneously reduce the overhead of overwhelming downlink pilot signaling and uplink feedback in time-varying massive MIMO systems, we propose a channel estimation scheme based on compressive sensing (CS) and deep learning (DL) in frequency division duplexing (FDD) massive MIMO systems. Specifically, we first develop a new CS-based algorithm for sparse channel estimation, which requires no priori knowledge of channel statistics. After obtaining the innitial channel estimation, we utilize two DL-based networks, named DnNet and DnLSTM respectively for denoising. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can considerably reduce the training and feedback overhead and outperform the existing classical algorithms.