Computationally efficient channel estimation in 5G massive multiple-input multiple-output systems

Traditional channel estimation algorithms such as minimum mean square error (MMSE) are widely used in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, but require a matrix inversion operation and an enormous amount of computations, which result in high computational complexity and make them impractical to implement. To overcome the matrix inversion problem, we propose a computationally efficient hybrid steepest descent Gauss–Seidel (SDGS) joint detection, which directly estimates the user’s transmitted symbol vector, and can quickly converge to obtain an ideal estimation value with a few simple iterations. Moreover, signal detection performance was further improved by utilizing the bit log-likelihood ratio (LLR) for soft channel decoding. Simulation results showed that the proposed algorithm had better channel estimation performance, which improved the signal detection by 31.68% while the complexity was reduced by 45.72%, compared with the existing algorithms.