Frequency selective millimeter‐wave channel estimation based on subspace enhancement algorithms

Summary In millimeter wave (mmW) communication systems, hybrid architecture, including the analog‐digital precoder and combiner matrices, is employed to take advantage of the multistream transceiver. In practice, mmW channel is assumed to be frequency‐selective, since the signal bandwidth is larger than the coherence bandwidth. Hence, orthogonal frequency‐division multiplexing signaling can be remedial. So far, most of the previous works on the frequency‐selective channel estimation have focused on the single measurement vector (SMV) form, whereas finding and exploiting the proper multimeasurement vector (MMV) model can improve upon the estimation procedure based on compressive sensing (CS) concepts. In fact, the estimation procedure based on the MMV model has a faster convergence speed than the SMV method specially, when the training frames are small. In this paper, we first extract the MMV model of the channel. In this model, the rank‐deficiency occurs as the number of training frames is less or equal to the sparsity level. Thus, the conventional estimation methods fail to provide the desirable performance. To overcome this issue, we propose two rank‐aware algorithms based on the enhancement of the observed signal subspace. The first algorithm assumes to know the sparsity level, while the second faces to the lack of knowledge about the sparsity level. The simulation results corroborate the fact that the proposed methods outperform the conventional CS algorithms such as Simultaneous Orthogonal Matching Pursuit.