Channel Estimation for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Aided mmWave MU-MIMO Systems : Hybrid Receiver Architectures

Channel estimation is one of the key challenges for the deployment of reconfigurable intelligence surface (RIS)-aided communication systems. In this paper, we study the channel estimation problem of RIS-aided mmWave multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems especially when a hybrid receiver architecture is adopted. For this system, we propose a simple yet efficient channel estimation method using the fact that cascaded channels (to be estimated) have low-dimensional common column space. In the proposed method, the reflection vectors at the RIS and the RF combining matrices at the BS are designed such that the training observations are suitable for estimating the common column space and the user-specific coefficient matrices via a collaborative low-rank approximation. Via simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed channel estimation method compared with the state-of-the-art ones.