Kuang et al. / Front Inform Technol Electron Eng 2017 18(6):841-849 841
Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering
www.zju.edu.cn/jzus; engineering.cae.cn; www.springerlink.com
ISSN 2095-9184 (print); ISSN 2095-9230 (online)
E-mail: jzus@zju.edu.cn
Joint DOA and channel estimation with data detection
based on 2D unitary ESPRIT in massive MIMO systems
∗
Jing-ming KUANG, Yuan ZHOU, Ze-song FEI
‡
(School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China)
E-mail: jmkuang@bit.edu.cn; zhouyuanbit@163.com; feizesong@bit.edu.cn
Received Jan. 9, 2017; Revision accepted Apr. 20, 2017; Crosschecked June 9, 2017
Abstract: We propose a novel method for joint two-dimensional (2D) direction-of-arrival (DOA) and channel
estimation with data detection for uniform rectangular arrays (URAs) for the massive multiple-input multiple-output
(MIMO) systems. The conventional DOA estimation algorithms usually assume that the channel impulse responses
are known exactly. However, the large number of antennas in a massive MIMO system can lead to a challenge
in estimating accurate corresponding channel impulse responses. In contrast, a joint DOA and channel estimation
scheme is proposed, which first estimates the channel impulse responses for the links between the transmitters and
antenna elements using training sequences. After that, the DOAs of the waves are estimated based on a unitary
ESPRIT algorithm using previous channel impulse response estimates instead of accurate channel impulse responses
and then, the enhanced channel impulse response estimates can be obtained. The proposed estimator enjoys closed-
form expressions, and thus it bypasses the search and pairing processes. In addition, a low-complexity approach
toward data detection is presented by reducing the dimension of the inversion matrix in massive MIMO systems.
Different cases for the proposed method are analyzed by changing the number of antennas. Experimental results
demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.
Key words: Two-dimensional (2D) direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation; Channel impulse response estimation;
Data detection; Uniform rectangular array (URA); Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1631/FITEE.1700025 CLC number: TN828.6
1 Introduction
The massive multiple-input multiple-output
(massive MIMO) technique, a key technology of fifth
generation (5G) wireless systems (Marzetta, 2010;
Rusek et al., 2013), has attracted increasing atten-
tion due to its improved throughput, spectral effi-
ciency, and link reliability (Larsson et al., 2014). In
a massive MIMO system, each base station (BS) is
equipped with a large number of antennas with the
objective of serving a number of single-antenna mo-
bile stations (MSs) that simultaneously occupy the
same set of time and frequency resources (Lan et
‡
Corresponding author
*
Project supported by Ericsson and the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (No. 61371075)
OR CID: Ze-song FEI, http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7576-625X
c
Zhejiang University and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2017
al., 2016). It is well known that the beamforming
performance in massive MIMO systems relies closely
on the accuracy of the estimated direction-of-arrival
(DOA) (Hu et al., 2014). The antenna arrays of mas-
sive MIMO systems are meant to be implemented in
more than one dimension because of the constraints
concerning array aperture. The extension of the an-
tenna array dimension offers flexibility at the ter-
minal, specifically for spatial pre-processing in both
horizontal and vertical domains. Consequently, esti-
mating the azimuth and elevation angles efficiently
and accurately is a crucial problem.
DOA estimation has been of interest for decades
across a broad range of signal processing technologies
including radar, sonar, and wireless communications.
There are many existing methods, such as maximum
likelihood (ML) spectral estimation (Capon, 1983),