A Low-Complexity Joint User Activity, Channel and Data Estimation for Grant-Free Massive MIMO Systems

Abstract

This letter considers a joint user activity, channel and data estimation problem in an uplink grant-free massive MIMO systems with low-precision analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). This joint estimation is firstly formalized as a non-overlapping group sparse problem, in which the components of compound channel follow independent conditional distribution. To address this problem, a new algorithm consists of the celebrated bilinear generalized approximate message passing (BiG-AMP) and loop belief propagation (LBP) is then proposed, where the strong connection of compound channel can be decoupled in LBP part. By exchanging the information between BiG-AMP part and LBP part, the proposed algorithm improves the performance of channel estimation compared with HyGAMP based method, in which the estimated payload data of proposed algorithm are utilized to aid channel estimation and it leads to relatively few pilot symbols to achieve equivalent channel and data estimation performances. The simulation results confirm that our proposed joint estimation algorithm improves the performance of the existing works in terms of user activity, channel and data estimation.