ResNet-Enabled cGAN Model for Channel Estimation in Massive MIMO System

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), or large-scale MIMO, is one of the key technologies for future wireless networks to exhibit a large accessible spectrum and throughput. The performance of a massive MIMO system is strongly reliant on the nature of various channels and interference during multipath transmission. Therefore, it is important to compute accurate channel estimation. This paper considers a massive MIMO system with one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) on each receiver antenna of the base station. Deep learning (DL)-based channel estimation framework has been developed to reduce signal processing complexity. This DL framework uses conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) and various convolutional neural networks, namely reverse residual network (reverse ResNet), squeeze-and-excitation ResNet (SE ResNet), ResUNet++, and reverse SE ResNet, as the generator model of cGAN for extracting the features from the quantized received signals. The simulation results of this paper show that the trained residual block-based generator model of cGAN has better channel generation performance than the standard generator model in terms of mean square error.