Joint Activity Detection and Channel Estimation in Massive MIMO Systems With Angular Domain Enhancement

To support massive connectivity for sporadically active devices is a challenging task, as the randomness of the channel and the large number of users lead to enormous increase of communication overhead. Different to the existing methods that differentiate users in resources including time, frequency and code, we propose a new joint activity detection and channel estimation framework for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where angular domain information of active users is exploited to enhance activity detection and channel estimation. By exploiting the sporadic activity of users and the angular spread of the wireless signals, the activity detection and channel estimation is formulated as a compressive sensing problem with multiple measurement vectors, which has a simultaneously row-sparse and clustered sparse structure. The sizes and positions of the nonzero clusters are arbitrary, which brings new challenges for algorithm derivation. To this end, we develop new algorithms based on sparse Bayesian learning, where novel hyper-priors are proposed to capture the structural signal characteristics, and appropriate approximations are employed to facilitate algorithm derivations. Numerical experiments demonstrate the improved activity detection and channel estimation performance of the proposed approach in comparison to the existing methods.