Efficient Bayesian compressed sensing-based channel estimation techniques for massive MIMO-OFDM systems

Efficient and highly accurate channel state information (CSI) at the base station (BS) is essential to achieve the potential benefits of massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems. However, the achievable accuracy that is attainable is limited in practice due to the problem of pilot contamination. It has recently been shown that compressed sensing (CS) techniques can address the pilot contamination problem. However, CS-based channel estimation requires prior knowledge of channel sparsity to achieve optimum performance, also the conventional CS techniques show poor recovery performance for low signal to noise ratio (SNR). To overcome these shortages, in this paper, an efficient channel estimation approach is proposed for massive MIMO systems using Bayesian compressed sensing (BCS) based on prior knowledge of statistical information regarding channel sparsity. Furthermore, by utilizing the common sparsity feature inherent in the massive MIMO system channel, we extend the proposed Bayesian algorithm to a multi-task (MT) version, so the developed MT-BCS can obtain better performance results than the single task version. Several computer simulation based experiments are performed to confirm that the proposed methods can reconstruct the original channel coefficient more effectively when compared to the conventional channel estimator in terms of estimation accuracy.