Near/Far-Field Channel Estimation for Terahertz Systems With ELAAs: A Block-Sparsity-Aware Approach

Millimeter wave/Terahertz (mmWave/THz) communication with extremely large-scale antenna arrays (ELAAs) offers a promising solution to meet the escalating demand for high data rates in next-generation communications. A large array aperture, along with the ever increasing carrier frequency over the mmWave/THz bands, leads to a large Rayleigh distance. As a result, the traditional planar-wave assumption may not hold valid for mmWave/THz systems featuring ELAAs. In this paper, we consider the problem of hybrid near/far-field channel estimation by taking spherical wave propagation into account. By analyzing the coherence properties of any two near-field steering vectors, we prove that the hybrid near/far-field channel admits a block-sparse representation on a specially designed unitary matrix. Specifically, the percentage of nonzero elements of such a block-sparse representation is in the order of 1/√N, which tends to zero as the number of antennas,N, grows. Such a block-sparse representation allows to convert channel estimation into a block-sparse signal recovery problem. Simulation results are provided to verify our theoretical results and illustrate the performance of the proposed channel estimation approach in comparison with existing state-of-the-art methods.