Narrowband Channel Estimation for Hybrid Beamforming Millimeter Wave Communication Systems with One-bit Quantization

Abstract: Millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum has drawn attention due to its tremendous available bandwidth. The high propagation losses in the mmWave bands necessitate beamforming with a large number of antennas. Traditionally each antenna is paired with a high-speed analog-to-digital converter (ADC), which results in high power consumption. A hybrid beamforming architecture and one-bit resolution ADCs have been proposed to reduce power consumption. However, analog beamforming and one-bit quantization make channel estimation more challenging. In this paper, we propose a narrowband channel estimation algorithm for mmWave communication systems with one-bit ADCs and hybrid beamforming based on generalized approximate message passing (GAMP). We show through simulation that 1) GAMP variants with one-bit ADCs have better performance than do least-squares estimation methods without quantization, 2) the proposed one-bit GAMP algorithm achieves the lowest estimation error among the GAMP variants, and 3) exploiting more frames and RF chains enhances the channel estimation performance.