A Bayesian Framework For Cascaded Channel Estimation in RIS-Aided mmWave Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate cascaded channel estimation for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided millimeter-wave multi-user communication systems. Since the complex channel gains of the cascaded RIS channel are generally non-Gaussian, the use of the linear minimum mean squared error (LMMSE) estimator leads to inevitable performance degradation. To tackle this issue, we propose a variational inference-based framework that approximates the complex channel gains using a complex adaptive Laplace prior, which effectively captures their probability distributions in a tractable way. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed estimator outperforms conventional estimators including least squares and LMMSE in terms of cascaded channel estimation error.

arXiv commentAccepted to IEEE Wireless Communications Letters