Auxiliary Beam Pair Enabled AoD and AoA Estimation in Closed-Loop Large-Scale Millimeter-Wave MIMO Systems

Channel estimation is of critical importance in millimeter-wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Due to the use of large antenna arrays, low-complexity mmWave specific channel estimation algorithms are required. In this paper, an auxiliary beam pair design is proposed to provide high-resolution estimates of the channel's angle-of-departure (AoD) and angle-of-arrival (AoA) for mmWave MIMO systems. By performing an amplitude comparison with respect to each auxiliary beam pair, a set of ratio measures that characterize the channel's AoD and AoA are obtained by the receiver. Either the best ratio measure or the estimated AoD is quantized and fed back to the transmitter via a feedback channel. The proposed technique can be incorporated into control channel design to minimize initial access delay. Though the design principles are derived assuming a high-power regime, evaluation under more realistic assumption shows that by employing the proposed method, good angle estimation performance is achieved under various signal-to-noise ratio levels and channel conditions.