Low-Complexity Massive MIMO Subspace Estimation and Tracking From Low-Dimensional Projections

Massive MIMO is a variant of multiuser MIMO, in which the number of antennas M at the base-station is very large. It has been observed that in many realistic propagation scenarios, although the user channel vectors have a very high-dim M, they lie on low-dim subspaces because of their limited angular spread (spatial correlation). This low-dim subspace structure remains stable across several coherence blocks and can be exploited to improve the system performance. In a recent work, we addressed this problem and proposed a very effective novel algorithm referred to as Approximate Maximum-Likelihood (AML), which was formulated as a semi-definite program (SDP). In this paper, we address two problems left open in our previous work, namely, computational complexity and tracking. We propose a new algorithm that is reminiscent of Multiple Measurement Vectors (MMV) problem in Compressed Sensing and prove that it is equivalent to the AML Algorithm for sufficiently dense angular grids. It has also a very low computational complexity and is able to track the sharp transitions in the channel statistics very quickly. We provide numerical simulations to assess the estimation/tracking performance of our proposed algorithm, with a particular emphasis on situations where a direct implementation of the SDP is infeasible in real-time. Our proposed algorithm is of independent interest in applications other than massive MIMO. We provide numerical simulations to compare the performance of our algorithm with that of other related subspace estimation algorithms in the literature.