Near-Field Channel Estimation in Mixed LoS/NLoS Environments for Extremely Large-Scale MIMO Systems

Abstract: Accurate channel model and channel estimation are essential to empower extremely large-scale MIMO (XL-MIMO) in 6G networks with ultra-high spectral efficiency. With the sharp increase in the antenna array aperture of the XL-MIMO scenario, the electromagnetic propagation field will change from far-field to near-field. Unfortunately, due to the near-field effect, most of the existing XL-MIMO channel models fail to describe mixed line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) path components simultaneously. In this paper, a mixed LoS/NLoS near-field XL-MIMO channel model is proposed to match the practical near-field XL-MIMO scenario, where the LoS path component is modeled by the geometric free space propagation assumption while NLoS path components are modeled by the near-field array response vectors. Then, to define the range of near-field for XL-MIMO, the MIMO Rayleigh distance (MIMO-RD) and MIMO advanced RD (MIMO-ARD) is derived. Next, a two stage channel estimation algorithm is proposed, where the LoS path component and NLoS path components are estimated separately. Moreover, the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of the proposed algorithm is derived in this paper. Numerical simulation results demonstrate that, the proposed two stage scheme is able to outperform the existing methods in both the theoretical channel model and the QuaDRiGa channel emulation platform.