On Channel Estimation for Group-Connected Beyond Diagonal RIS Assisted Multi-User MIMO Communication

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Rui, Gao, Junyuan, Zhang, Shuowen, Clerckx, Bruno, Liu, Liang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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_version_ 1866910031322021888
author Wang, Rui
Gao, Junyuan
Zhang, Shuowen
Clerckx, Bruno
Liu, Liang
author_facet Wang, Rui
Gao, Junyuan
Zhang, Shuowen
Clerckx, Bruno
Liu, Liang
contents Beyond diagonal reconfigurable intelligent surface (BD-RIS) architectures offer superior beamforming gain over conventional diagonal RISs. However, the channel estimation overhead is the main hurdle for reaping the above gain in practice. This letter addresses this issue for group-connected BDRIS aided uplink communication from multiple multi-antenna users to one multi-antenna base station (BS). We first reveal that within each BD-RIS group, the cascaded channel associated with one user antenna and one BD-RIS element is a scaled version of that associated with any other user antenna and BD-RIS element due to the common RIS-BS channel. This insight drastically reduces the dimensionality of the channel estimation problem. Building on this property, we propose an efficient two-phase channel estimation protocol. In the first phase, the reference cascaded channels for all groups are estimated in parallel based on common received signals while determining the scaling coefficients for a single reference antenna. In the second phase, the scaling coefficients for all remaining user antennas are estimated. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves substantially lower estimation error with fewer pilot signals compared to state-of-the-art benchmark schemes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_20559
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On Channel Estimation for Group-Connected Beyond Diagonal RIS Assisted Multi-User MIMO Communication
Wang, Rui
Gao, Junyuan
Zhang, Shuowen
Clerckx, Bruno
Liu, Liang
Signal Processing
Information Theory
Beyond diagonal reconfigurable intelligent surface (BD-RIS) architectures offer superior beamforming gain over conventional diagonal RISs. However, the channel estimation overhead is the main hurdle for reaping the above gain in practice. This letter addresses this issue for group-connected BDRIS aided uplink communication from multiple multi-antenna users to one multi-antenna base station (BS). We first reveal that within each BD-RIS group, the cascaded channel associated with one user antenna and one BD-RIS element is a scaled version of that associated with any other user antenna and BD-RIS element due to the common RIS-BS channel. This insight drastically reduces the dimensionality of the channel estimation problem. Building on this property, we propose an efficient two-phase channel estimation protocol. In the first phase, the reference cascaded channels for all groups are estimated in parallel based on common received signals while determining the scaling coefficients for a single reference antenna. In the second phase, the scaling coefficients for all remaining user antennas are estimated. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves substantially lower estimation error with fewer pilot signals compared to state-of-the-art benchmark schemes.
title On Channel Estimation for Group-Connected Beyond Diagonal RIS Assisted Multi-User MIMO Communication
topic Signal Processing
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20559