Two-Phase Channel Estimation for UPA-Type RIS-Aided Multi-User mmWave Systems with Reduced Pilot Overhead and Error Propagation

In this paper, an efficient two-phase channel estimation scheme with reduced pilot overhead and error propagation is proposed for a uniform planar array (UPA)-type reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided multi-user (MU) millimeter wave (mmWave) system. In Phase I, based on the carefully designed RIS phase shift matrix, all users jointly transmit the pilot signals to estimate the correlation factors between different propagation paths of the common RIS-base station (BS) channel, which facilitates a significant MU diversity gain. Then, in Phase II, with the constructed ambiguous RIS-BS channel composed of the correlation factors obtained in the previous phase, each user independently sends a few pilots to estimate their own ambiguous user-RIS channel so as to obtain the entire cascaded channel. Simulation results validate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms in terms of both pilot overhead and estimation accuracy, and that its estimation performance improves as the number of users increases.