Channel Estimation and Localization for mmWave
Systems: A Sparse Bayesian Learning Approach
Feibai Zhu, Student Member IEEE, An Liu, Senior Member IEEE, and Vincent K. N. Lau, Fellow IEEE
Abstract—Millimeter wave (mmWave) systems have potential
advantages for high accuracy localization due to their large
bandwidth and highly directional and sparse channel. The
existing schemes on mmWave system localization only explore
the channel’s angular sparsity and restrict the representation of
angular parameters to fixed grids. In this paper, we propose a
joint sparse channel model with adjustable grids of angles and
delays of mmWave paths, which not only enables exploiting the
joint sparsity in angular and delay domain, but also mitigates
the quantization error due to fixed grids. We formulate the
estimation of channel, angles and delays as a sparse Bayesian
learning problem and propose to solve it using an in-exact block
minorization-maximization algorithm and then determine the
user location. We verify the performance of the algorithm by
simulations.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication offers an op-
portunity for high accuracy localization of mobile station due
to the higher resolution of the time of arrival (ToA), and the
highly directional property of the mmWave propagation [1],
i.e., only a few spatial paths contribute to the received power.
Such sparse property makes it easier to estimate paths’ angular
information, i.e., angles of departure (AoDs) and angles of
arrival (AoAs). Considering the channel and the localization
parameters are affected by the same propagation physics, in
this paper, we work on the problem of channel and localization
based on the downlink received signal.
In the literature, receiver signal strength (RSS)-based local-
ization methods is found in [2], yet the RSS modeling are
sensitive to the mismatch of the pathloss model of mmWave
systems. For high accuracy localization in mmWave systems,
both angles (AoDs and AoAs) and multipath delays (ToAs) of
the sparse paths should be exploited to enhance the accuracy
of localization [3]. In [4] and [5], the recovery of angles is
formulated as a compressive sensing (CS) problem. However,
these works have only exploit the angular domain sparsity
without exploiting the delay domain sparsity, and assume the
angles to lie on a fixed grid (to construct a sparse channel rep-
resentation for CS recovery), which creates mismatch between
the grids and angles. Super-resolution algorithms, such as the
off-grid sparse Bayesian learning (OGSBL) [6] may avoid
the mismatch of angles. However, OGSBL-like algorithms
approximate the off-grid values by first-order Taylor approxi-
mation [6], which may lead to a large approximation error.
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China
under Project No. 61571383. Feibai Zhu and Vincent K. N. Lau are with the
Department of ECE, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
(email: fzhu@connect.ust.hk; eeknlau@ust.hk). An Liu is with the College of
Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University (e-mail:
anliu@zju.edu.cn).
978-1-5386-8088-9/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE
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In [7], an in-exact block minorization-maximization (MM)
is proposed to directly handle the off-grid AoAs for the 1D
case with AoA variables only. However, the surrogate function
design and convergence proof cannot be directly applied to the
three-dimensional (3D) case (the variables not only include
AoAs, but also AoDs and delays).
In this paper, we propose a joint sparse channel model
with adjustable non-uniform grids for high-accuracy local-
ization. In our joint sparse channel model, not only the
angles (AoDs/AoAs), but also and multipath delays (ToAs) are
quantized using adjustable grids to facilitate the exploitation
of joint angular-delay domain sparsity and to eliminate the
mismatch between the actual AoDs/AoAs/TOAs and fixed
grids. We adopt the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) framework
to jointly estimate the propagation parameters (AoD, AoA
and ToA) and the grid adjustments. Based on an in-exact
block MM algorithm, we propose efficient surrogate functions
which exploit the problem-specific structure to solve the
resulting SBL problem. Compared to the in-exact block MM
in [7] which only involves a single non-convex block (AoA),
the proposed in-exact block MM involves three non-convex
blocks (AoD/AoA/ToA) and adopts modified expectation-
maximization (EM)-based surrogate functions to ensure con-
vergence. Notations: a ◦ b denotes the Hadamard product
(element-wise product) of vector a and b. AΩ denotes the
sub-matrices formed by collecting the columns of A, whose
indices are in Ω.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL
Consider a MIMO system with a base station (BS) equipped
with NT antennas and a user equipped with NR antennas
operating at a carrier frequency fc (corresponding to wave-
length λc ) and bandwidth B, as illustrated in Fig. 1. Locations
of the user and BS are denoted by p = [px , py ] ∈ R2
T
T 2
and q = [qx , qy ] ∈ R , respectively, with α ∈ [−π, π)
denoting the rotation angle of the user’s antenna array.
The value of q is assumed to be known, while p and α
are unknown. We consider the transmission of orthogonal
frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signals. At the BS,
G OFDM signals are transmitted sequentially, where the g-th
transmission comprises the transmitted symbols on each Tx
antenna x(g) [n] = [x1 [n] , · · · , xNT [n]] ∈
T
 C
NT
for
√ each
subcarrier n = 0, · · · , N − 1 and x [n]2 = 1/ N NT .
(g)
The symbols are transformed to the time-domain using N -
point IFFT. A cyclic prefix (CP) of length TCP = DTs is
added before converting the baseband signals to RF signals,
where Ts = 1/B denotes the sampling period and D is the
length of CP in the sampling periods.
 where w(g) [n] ∈ CNR is a Gaussian noise vector with zero
mean and variance σ 2 /2 per real  dimension
  and Φ̌(g) [n] ∈
NR ×(K+1)
C = ǍRx [n] diag f̌ [n] diag ǍTx [n] x(g) [n]
H

is a function of location-related parameters θ̌ Tx , θ̌ Rx , τ̌ .

Stacking the observation y(g) [n] along g, we
User have y [n] ∈ CGNR = Φ̌ [n] ȟ + w [n] , where
antenna
… antenna  T  T  T
w [n] = w(1) [n] , · · · , w(G) [n] and Φ̌ [n] ∈
  T  T  T
CGNR ×(K+1) = Φ̌(1) [n] , · · · , Φ̌(G) [n] .
Base station
Stacking the observation y [n] along n, we have
Figure 1: System model.  
y ∈ CN GNR = Φ̌ θ̌ Tx , θ̌ Rx , τ̌ ȟ + w,
 T T
Fig. 1 shows the location-related parameters of the channel.
where w =  w [0] , · · · , wT [N − 1] ,
and Φ̌ θ̌ Tx , θ̌ Rx , τ̌ ∈ CN GNR ×(K+1) =
These parameters include θ̌Tx,k , θ̌Rx,k and dk = cτ̌k , denoting   T  T T
the AoD, AoA, and the path length (with ToA τ̌k and the Φ̌ [0] , · · · , Φ̌ [N − 1] is a function of
speed of light c) of the k-th path (k = 0 for the LOS θ̌ Tx , θ̌ Rx , τ̌ . Our goal is first to estimate (θ Tx , θ Rx , τ , h)
path and k > 0 the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) paths). Note from y, and then estimate the location p and rotation angle
α = π + θ̌Tx,0 − θ̌Rx,0 . Here, the delay spread of the channel is α of the user based on (θ Tx , θ Rx , τ , h).
assumed to be smaller than TCP , i.e., maxk∈{0,··· ,K+1} τ̌k ≤
TCP , where K + 1 is the number of channel paths. Denote  III. S PARSE BAYESIAN L EARNING F ORMULATION
θ̌ Tx = θ̌Tx,0 , · · · , θ̌Tx,k , θ̌ Rx = θ̌Rx,0 , · · · , θ̌Rx,K and
τ̌ = [τ̌0 , · · · , τ̌K ]. For each NLOS path, there is a scatterer A. Sparse Representation of mmWave MIMO Channels
with unknown location sk , for which we define dk,1 = We introduce a sparse representation of the mmWave
sk − q2 and dk,2 = p − sk 2 as the distances from the BS MIMO channel with adjustable grids. Define a grid (a
to the scatterer and from the scatterer to the user, respectively. discrete set) Gfix = {(θTx,m , θRx,m , τm ) , m = 1, · · · , M }
We now introduce the wideband mmWave channel model, which contains M > K + 1 sets of parameters. Specifi-
T
under a frequency-dependent array response. Assuming the cally, denote θ Tx,fix = [θTx,fix,1 , · · · , θTx,fix,M ] , θ Rx,fix =
T T
channel remains constant during the transmission of G sym- [θRx,fix,1 , · · · , θRx,fix,M ] and τ fix = [τfix,1 , · · · , τfix,M ] .
bols, the NR ×NT channel matrix on subcarrier n is expressed The values of the elements of θ Tx,fix , θ Rx,fix and τ fix
as
   Gfix uniformly cover the range of [−π, π), [−π, π) and
in
H [n] = ǍRx [n] diag f̌ [n] ◦ ȟ ǍH 0, TCP , respectively, and the number of grid points within
Tx [n] ,
each range is NAoD , NAoA and ND , respectively. In other
     words, we let M = NAoD NAoA ND such that the set G covers
where ǍTx [n] =  ǎTx [n] θ̌Tx,0  , · · · , ǎTx [n] θ̌Tx,K ,
ǍRx [n] = ǎRx [n] θ̌Rx,0 , · · · , ǎRx [n] θ̌Rx,K , NAoD NAoA ND combinations of grid points of AoD, AoA and
 ToA.
f̌ [n] = e−j2πnτ̌0 /(N Ts ) , · · · , e−j2πnτ̌K /(N Ts ) and
 T   In practice, the true location-related parameters do not lie
ȟ = ȟ0 ,· · · , ȟK with ǎTx [n] θ̌Tx,k ∈ CNT , ∀k exactly on the grid point in G. A conventional method to ad-
and ǎRx [n] θ̌Rx,k ∈ C , ∀k denoting the Tx and Rx
NR
dress this problem is to use a dense grid, i.e., use a large NAoD ,
array response vectors of the K + 1 paths on subcarrier n NAoA and ND , such that the mismatch with grids is negligible
respectively, and with ȟk denoting the channel coefficient [8]. However, for the localization problem considered, we also
of the k-th path. Denote the channel  across all subcarriers
 need to estimate the ToA, which increases the parameter space.
T
as H ∈ CN NR ×NT =
T T
H [0] , · · · , H [N − 1] . Moreover, unlike the channel estimation problem, localization
The structure of the frequency-dependent is more sensitive to the mismatch between the true and
  array response
vectors ǎTx [n] θ̌Tx,k and ǎRx [n] θ̌Rx,k depends estimated parameters. As a result, we need to use a very large
on the specific array structure. For the case of a NAoD , NAoA and ND , leading to a high algorithm complexity.
uniform linear array (ULA), which will be the example To overcome the mismatch and complexity issues of using

studied in this paper, we have ǎTx [n] θ̌Tx,k = fixed grids, we adopt adjustable grids, where the grid parame-
 NT −1 2π NT −1 2π
T ters θ Tx , θ Rx and τ are not fixed but adjustable. In this case,
√1
NT
e−j 2 λn d sin(θ̌Tx,k ) , · · · , ej 2 λn d sin(θ̌Tx,k ) , as long as M is larger than K + 1 (which is usually a small
where λn = c/(n/(N Ts ) + fc ) is the signal wavelength at in mmWave channels), there always exist a set of unknown
the n-th subcarrier and d denotes the distance between the grid parameters G̃ = {(θTx,m , θRx,m , τm ), m = 1, · · · , M }
antenna elements (we will
 focus on the case d = λc /2). The that can exactly represent the true NR × NT channel matrix
response vector ǎRx [n] θ̌Rx,k is similar. by
The received signal for subcarrier n and transmission g, H [n] = ARx [n] diag (f [n] ◦ h) AH Tx [n] , (1)
after CP removal and FFT, can be expressed as
where f [n] ∈ CM =
(g) (g) (g) (g) (g)
 −j2πnτ /(N T ) −j2πnτ )
T
y [n] = H [n] x [n] + w [n] = Φ̌ [n] ȟ + w [n] , e 1 s
,··· ,e M /(N T s
, h ∈ CM =

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 m 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
θTx,m −π −π
−π −π π π π 3π For ρm , ∀m, we model Mit as independent Gamma distributions
2 2 3 2 2 12 2 4
θRx,m −π
2
−π
2
π
3
π
2
−π
2
−π
6
π
2
π
4
[13], i.e., p (ρ) = m=1 Γ (ρm ; 1 + aρ , bρ ) , where we set
τm (TCP ) 0.25 0.75 0.1 0.75 0.25 0.6 0.25 0.8 aρ , bρ to be a small number. This two-stage hierarchical prior
gives
Table I: An example of the adjustable grid G̃ for the location-
related parameters when NAoD = 3, NAoA = 2 and ND = 2.

  
p (h) = CN h| 0, diag ρ−1 p (ρ) dρ
T
[h1 , · · · , hM ] is a sparse channel vector with K + 1
−(aρ +3/2)
non-zero channel coefficients corresponding to the
K + 1 true channel coefficients ȟ0 , · · · , ȟK , and
ATx [n] ∈ CNT ×M = [aTx [n] (θTx,1 ) , · · · , aTx [n] (θTx,M )],
ARx [n] ∈ CNR ×M = [aRx [n] (θRx,1 ) , · · · , aRx [n] (θRx,M )].
Therefore, with the adjustable grids, the received
signal on subcarrier n at time g can be rewritten
as y(g) [n] = Φ(g) [n] h + w 
(g)
[n] , where 
Φ(g) [n] = ARx [n] diag (f [n]) diag AHTx [n] x
(g)
[n] .
Stacking the observations y(g) [n] first along g and then along
n, we have
y = Φ (θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ) h + w,
where Φ (θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ) = with the knowledge of ρ plus the AoDs, AoAs and ToAs,
     T
T T
Φ(1) [0] , · · · , Φ(G) [N − 1] . For example,
when NAoD = 2, NAoA = 2, ND = 2, K + 1 = 3, and
the true AoDs, AoAs, ToAs and channel coefficients of
the actual paths are [−π/3, π/12, 3π/4], [π/3,  −π/6, π/4],
[0.1TCP , 0.6TCP , 0.8TCP ] and ȟ0 , ȟ1 , ȟ2 , respectively,
the adjustable grid G̃ is given in Table I, and we
have Ωh = {3, 6, 8} and the sparse channel vector
 T
h = 0, 0, ȟ0 , 0, 0, ȟ1 , 0, ȟ2 .
Therefore, once we recover the sparse channel vector h,
the AoD, AoA and ToA information can be extracted from the
support of h, which can be further used for localization. When
G̃ is known, the measurement model is linear w.r.t. h. Then
the recovery of h can be formulated as a LASSO problem [9],
which is convex and is guaranteed to converge to the global
optimum. However, by treating the AoD, AoA and ToA grids
as adjustable variables, the measurement matrix in (2) will
contain unknown grid parameters θ Tx , θ Rx , τ . As such, (2)
is no longer a standard CS model with a known measurement
matrix, and the resulting grid parameter learning and sparse
channel recovery problem cannot be solved by traditional
orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP)-based algorithms [10],
[11] or LASSO algorithms [9]. In order to recover h as well
M 
2
∝ bρ + |ρm | . (4)
m=1
The distribution in (4) promotes sparsity/compressibility of h
due to the distribution’s heavy tails and sharp peak at zero
with small aρ and bρ [13].
The prior ρ in (3) implies the support of h. Specifically,
for any m, when ρm is big, the variance of of hm tends to
be small and then hm tends to be small; when ρm is small,
hm tends to be large, which implies that m is likely to be in
the support of h. If we determine the support Ωh by choosing
the path indices with ρm below a certain threshold ρth , i.e.,
(2) Ωh = { m| ρm < ρth }, then the channel h can be estimated
†
as ĥ = (ΦΩh (θ Tx , θ Rx , τ )) y. Furthermore, we model the
inverse of the noise variance ω = σ12 as a Gamma hyperprior
Γ (ω; 1 + aω , bω ) to handle the uncertainty of unknown noise
variance in practice, where we set aω , bω → 0 as in [12] so
as to make Γ (ω; 1 + aω , bω ) decreases slowly with ω with a
heavy tail distribution.
Since it is difficult to directly obtain the MAP estimate of
h, we first focus on recovering the other unknown parameters
including ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx and τ . We target at finding the most
likely values ω ∗ , ρ∗ , θ ∗Tx , θ ∗Rx and τ ∗ jointly by maximizing
the a posteriori likelihood function p ( ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx , τ | y) or
equivalently ln p (y, ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ); i.e.,
(ω ∗ , ρ∗ , θ ∗Tx , θ ∗Rx , τ ∗ )
= arg max ln p (y, ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ) , (5)
ω,ρ,θ Tx ,θ Rx ,τ
where
p (y, ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx , τ )
  
= CN y − Φ (θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ) h| 0, ω −1 1
as learn the unknown grid parameters θ Tx , θ Rx and τ , we M 
     ρm −(hm )H ρm hm

adopt the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) framework in [12], CN h| 0, diag ρ−1 dh e ,
as elaborated in the next subsection. m=1
π

whose closed-form expression is difficult to obtain. If we can

B. Hierarchical Channel Prior and Sparse Bayesian Learning solve (5), the channel h and the location p can be recovered
Formulation from MAP estimates (ω ∗ , ρ∗ , θ ∗Tx , θ ∗Rx , τ ∗ ) as in Section
To exploit the joint sparsity in the angular-delay domain, IV-C. The above objective function ln p (y, ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx , τ )
we consider the following hierarchical prior for the sparse is a non-convex function with complicated couplings between
channel vector h. For hm , ∀m, we model it as a Gaussian five variables, ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx and τ . To solve it, traditional
prior distribution with a distinct variance 1/ρm . Letting ρ = gradient descent methods hardly work as there is no closed-
T
[ρ1 , · · · , ρM ] , we have form expression for the derivative of the objective function. To
   overcome this challenge, we propose a block MM algorithm
p ( h| ρ) = CN h| 0, diag ρ−1 . (3) to find a stationary point of (5).

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 IV. A LGORITHM FOR C HANNEL E STIMATION AND
L OCALIZATION
A. The Block Minorization-maximization Algorithm
In the block MM algorithm, we maximize the objective
function ln p (y, ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ) alternatively w.r.t. a dif-
ferent variable among ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx and τ . Since the
objective function has no closed-form expression, we itera-
tively construct a surrogate function (lower bound) for the
objective function. The surrogate function is designed to
simplify the optimization w.r.t. each variable. Specifically, let
difficult to find their optimal solutions. Therefore, in this paper,
(i+1) (i+1)
we use an in-exact block MM algorithm where θ Tx , θ Rx
(i+1)
and τ are obtained by applying a simple one-step gradient
update. In the following, we will discuss the hyperparameter
updates for ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx and τ , respectively. Despite the in-
(i+1) (i+1)
exact update for θ Tx , θ Rx and τ (i+1) , we can prove that
the in-exact block MM algorithm still converges to a stationary
solution of the optimization problem (5) as in Theorem 1.
B. Implementation of the Block Minorization-maximization
U ( ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx , τ | ż) be the surrogate function
constructed Algorithm
˙ ˙
at some fixed point ż = ω̇, ρ̇, θ Tx , θ Rx , τ̇ . It should satisfy
the following properties to ensure the algorithm convergence:
U ( ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx , τ | ż) ≤ ln p (y, ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ) ,
U ( ż| ż) = ln p (y, ż) ,
∂U ( z| ż) /∂z|z=ż = ∂ ln p (y, z) /∂z|z=ż .
Let z(i) denote the optimization variables at the beginning
of the i-th iteration. Then in the i-th iteration of the block MM
algorithm, we update ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx and τ as
 
1) Update for ω: Under the assumption of cir-
cularly symmetric complex Gaussian noises, we have 
p ( y| h, ω, θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ) = CN y| Φ (θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ) h, ω −1 I .
Then for any z = (ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ), we can obtain
(6)
(7) p ( h| y, z) = CN ( h| μ (z) , Σ (z)) , (15)
(8) where μ (z)  = ωΣ (ω, ρ, θTx , θ Rx , τ ) ΦH (θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ) y
−1
and Σ (z) = ωΦH (θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ) Φ (θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ) + diag (ρ) .
Based on this property, we can simplify the surrogate function
to a convex function and obtain the unique solution for (9):
(GN NR + aω − 1)
(i) (i)  ω (i+1) =  

,
ω (i+1) = arg maxU ω, ρ(i) , θ Tx , θ Rx , τ (i)  (i) (i)
(16)
ω bω + η ω (i) , ρ(i) , θ Tx , θ Rx , τ (i)
(i) (i) 
ω (i) , ρ(i) , θ Tx , θ Rx , τ (i) , (9)
  where for any z = (ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ),
(i) (i) 
ρ(i+1) = arg maxU ω (i+1) , ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx , τ (i) 
ρ  
(i+1) (i) (i)  η (z) = tr Φ (θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ) Σ (z) ΦH (θ Tx , θ Rx , τ )
ω , ρ(i) , θ Tx , θ Rx , τ (i) , (10)
 (i+1) (i+1)  + y − Φ (θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ) μ (z)2 .
2
(i+1) (i)  (17)
θ Tx = arg maxU ω ,ρ , θ Tx , θ Rx , τ (i) 
θ Tx 2) Update for ρ: Similarly, we obtain the unique solution
(i+1) (i) (i) 
ω , ρ(i+1) , θ Tx , θ Rx , τ (i) , (11) for (10):
 (i+1) (i+1) (i+1) 
(i+1) (i) 
θ Rx = arg maxU ω ,ρ , θ Tx , θ Rx , τ 
aρ
θ Rx
 ρ(i+1)
m =   

 ,∀m,
(i+1) (i) (i+1) (i) (i)
ω (i+1)
,ρ (i+1)
, θ Tx , θ Rx , τ (i) , (12) bρ + diag Ξ ω , ρ(i) , θ Tx , θ Rx , τ (i)
  m
(i+1) (i+1)  (18)
τ (i+1) = arg max U ω (i+1) , ρ(i+1) , θ Tx , θ Rx , τ 
τ
(i+1) (i+1) (i+1)  where for any z = (ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ), Ξ (z) = Σ (z) +
ω , ρ(i+1) , θ Tx , θ Rx , τ (i) . (13) μ (z) μH (z).
The update rules (9) – (13) guarantee the convergence of 3) Update for θ Tx , θ Rx and τ : Based on (15), the surrogate
the block MM algorithm, as is proved in [14]. Inspired by function in (14) w.r.t θ Tx is derived as
the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm [15], we denote 
z = (ω, ρ, θ Tx , θ Rx , τ ) and construct the surrogate function  (i) 
U ω (i+1) , ρ(i+1) , θ Tx , θ Rx , τ (i) 
at a fixed point ż as 
(i) (i)
= ω (i+1) , ρ(i+1) , θ Tx , θ Rx , τ (i)
 
2
U ( z| ż)  (i) 
= − ω (i+1) y − Φ θ Tx , θ Rx , τ (i) μ(i)  − ω (i+1) ·

4M
 +1  

2


p (h, y, z) 2 (i) (i) (i)
= p ( h| y, ż) ln dh + ϑj zj − żj  , tr Φ θ Tx , θ Rx , τ (i) Σ ω (i+1) , ρ(i+1) , θ Tx , θ Rx , τ (i)
p ( h| y, ż)


j=1

(14) (i) (i)
Φ H
θ Tx , θ Rx , τ . (19)
where ϑj > 0 can be any constant, which satisfies the
properties
4Min+1(6) – (8) as is2proved in [14]. The regularization Since (19) is non-convex and it is difficult to find (11)’s global
term j=1 ϑj zj − żj  is added to ensure the conver- optimal solution, we use an in-exact block MM algorithm to
gence of the in-exact block MM algorithm [14]. However, the update θ Tx ; i.e., we apply gradient update on the objective
maximization problems in (11) – (13) are non-convex, and it is function of (19) as

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 within [−π, π). There are two scatterers, namely s1 and s2 ,
(i+1) (i)
θ Tx = θ Tx + ΔθTx DθTTx , (20) whose location distributions are the same as that of the user.
There exist a LOS path between the BS and the user and 2
where ΔθTx is the stepsize, and DθTx ∈ C1×M is the
NLOS paths that start from the BS, pass through a scatterer
derivative of (19) w.r.t θ Tx . DθTx can be obtained by ap-
and arrive at the user. The numbers of transmit and receive
plying matrix algebra. To determine the stepsize, we can use
antennas are set to NT = 8 and NR = 8. We set fc = 60
the classical backtracking line search [16], which guarantees
GHz, B = 100 MHz and N = 32. The path loss ρk between
that the objective function (19) is strictly increasing before
convergence.  for
the k-th path is modeled as 1/ρk =
the BS and the user
2
Similarly to the update of θ Tx , the update of θ Rx and τ can σ02 P0 (dk,2 )ξ 2 (dk ) 4πd
λc
k
, where σ02 is the reflection loss,
be obtained by the following steps: First, derive the surrogate P0 (dk,2 ) = (γr dk,2 )2 e−γr dk,2 is the Poisson distribution of
functions. Second, derive the derivatives of these two surrogate reflector geometry with density γr (set to 1/7 [17]), ξ 2 (d
k )
2
functions w.r.t. θ Rx and τ , respectively. Third, update θ Rx and is the atmospheric attenuation over distance dk , and 4πd λc
τ in their derivative direction, respectively; i.e., k
is the free space path loss over distance dk . The reflection
loss for the first-order reflection σ02 is set to −3 dB, and the
(i+1) (i)
θ Rx = θ Rx + ΔθRx DθRx , (21) atmospheric attenuation over distance dk is set to 16 dB/km.
τ (i+1)
=τ (i)
+ Δτ D τ , (22) The number of sequentially transmitted signals is G = 8 and
the grid parameters are set as NAoD = 8, NAoA = 8 and
where ΔθRx and Δτ are the stepsizes for θ Rx and τ , respec- ND = 4. Each element of pilot sequence x(g) [n] ∈ CNT along
tively, and DθRx and Dτ are the derivatives of the surrogate sequentially transmitted symbols indexed by g and different
function w.r.t. θ Rx and τ , respectively, and can be obtained subcarriers indexed by n, is obtained as a zero mean
 (g)complex

by applying matrix algebra. Gaussian random variable, then normalized s.t. x [n] =
√ 2
Theorem 1: For the surrogate function defined in (14), if 1/ N NT .
variables are iteratively updated by (16), (18)
 and (20) – (22),
We compare our proposed algorithm with the following
the iterates converge to a stationary point ω̂, ρ̂, θ̂ Tx , θ̂ Rx , τ̂
of the optimization problem (5).
Proof: The proof exploits the regularization term in (14)
to ensure the gap between two consecutive iterates of (20) –
(22) converge to zero . Please refer to [14] for details.
C. Conversion to Channel, Location and Rotation Angle Es-
baselines: the SOMP-SAGE algorithm proposed in [4]; the
maximum likelihood (ML) algorithm (only find a stationary
point of the ML problem); the ML-MIP algorithm which is
obtained by first running the ML algorithm with 20 uniformly
distributed initial search points, and then finding the best
solution out of the 20 stationary points of the ML problem;
and the OGSBL algorithm in [6].
  
H
timates 
We define SNR  E (Φh) (Φh) / wH w . In Fig. 2,
After we obtain the estimates ω̂, ρ̂, θ̂ Tx , θ̂ Rx , τ̂ using the
in-exact block MM algorithm, we can recover the channel
vector h based on them. First, we identify the support of active
paths h by Ωh = { m| ρm < ρth }. We set ρth = 3NMTω̂NR ,
which means if ρm < ρth , then the estimated variance of the
power hm is larger than 3 times of the estimated average power
of elements of Φ† w. The number of identified paths is K̂+1 =
|Ωh |. Once we obtain the channel support Ωh , the elements of
the channel vector supported on Ωh , i.e., ĥΩh ∈ CK̂+1 , can
be estimated via the following least-squares solution: ĥΩh =
we find that the ML and ML-MIP perform worse than the
SOMP-SAGE. This is due to that the ML problem has many
local optima. While SOMP-SAGE uses a specially designed
algorithm to explore the sparsity in the angular domain to
avoid getting stuck in a bad local optimum. However, SOMP-
SAGE does not estimate the ToAs in the first step of solving
the CS problem, which degrades the performance [3]. OGSBL
performs behind the proposed algorithm due to its first-
order Taylor approximation error. The proposed algorithm
provides considerable gain, due to its modeling of adjustable
 

† angle/multipath delay grids, its modeling of joint sparsity of
ΦΩh θ̂ Tx , θ̂ Rx , τ̂ y, and the rest of elements of channel
angles and multipath delay, and its use of a stable block MM
vector ĥ are set to zero. Then the estimated  parameters
for algorithm to exploit the joint sparsity.
the identified active paths are given by ρ̃, θ̃ Tx , θ̃ Rx , τ̃ , h̃ = From Fig. 2, it can be seen that the localization perfor-


ρ̂Ωh , θ̂ Tx,Ωh , θ̂ Rx,Ωh , τ̂ Ωh , ĥΩh . mance of the proposed algorithm improves with the SNR
gradually. ML and ML-MIP do not improve much with SNR
As the final step, the location and rotation angle of the user
because they easily get stuck in a local optimum. SOMP-

can be recovered based
on the estimates of AoD, AoA and
SAGE performance only improves slightly with SNR due
ToA, i.e., θ̃ Tx , θ̃ Rx , τ̃ , using the same method as in Section
to the quantization error from the fixed grids. The proposed
IV-D of [4]. algorithm is effective for high-accuracy localization and chan-
nel estimation. For example, at SNR = 20 dB: The root
V. S IMULATIONS mean square error (RMSE) of localization is 0.123 m. The
T
We set the BS’s location as q = (0, 0) . The user’s location normalized mean square error (NMSE) of the channel is 0.03.
p is uniformly distributed in a circle centered at q with radius The RMSE of AoD of the LOS path is 0.0075 rad (0.43◦ ).
32 meters, and the rotation angle α is uniformly distributed The RMSE of the ToA for the LOS path is 0.26 ns.

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 102
VI. C ONCLUSION
101 Proposed In this paper, we consider the localization for mmWave
SOMP-SAGE MIMO systems. We propose a sparse signal model that
MLF
100 MLF-MIP
incorporates adjustable grids of angles and multipath delays
OGSBL of mmWave paths, and exploits the joint sparsity of angles
10-1 and multipath delays. The estimation of the channel, angles
-10 -5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
and multipath delays is specifically formulated as a sparse
(a) Bayesian learning problem. To solve the problem, we pro-
pose an in-exact block minorization-maximization algorithm.
102
We employ these estimates to determine the user location.
Proposed Simulations verify the advantages of the proposed model and
SOMP-SAGE algorithm for recovering the channel and location.
101
MLF
MLF-MIP
OGSBL R EFERENCES
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