Due to the low per-antenna SNR and high signaling overhead, channel estimation is a major bottleneck in Massive MIMO systems. Spatial constraints can improve estimation performance by exploiting sparsity. Solutions exist for far field - beam domain channel estimation based on angle of arrival estimation. However, there is no equivalent solution for near field and distributed MIMO spatial channel estimation. We present a solution- source domain channel estimation- that is based on source location estimation. We extend this to employ a "Channel Database" incorporating information about the physical scattering environment into channel estimation. We present methods for generation, storage and usage of the Channel Database to assist localization and communication.
@article{arxiv.1712.07149,
title = {Distributed Massive MIMO Channel Estimation and Channel Database Assistance},
author = {Arkady Molev-Shteiman and Laurence Mailaender and Xiao-Feng Qi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.07149},
year = {2017}
}