Improving MIMO channel estimation via receive power feedback

Abstract

Estimating the channel state is known to be an important problem in wireless networks. To this end, it matters to exploit all the available information to improve channel estimation accuracy as much as possible. It turns out that the problem of exploiting the information associated with the receive power feedback (e.g., the received signal strength indicator -RSSI-) has not been identified and solved; in this setup, the transmitter is assumed to receive feedback from all the receivers in presence. As shown in this paper, to solve this problem, classical estimation tools can be used. Using the corresponding MMSE is shown to be always beneficial, whereas the relevance of using the MAP estimator would depend on the operating SNR.