Sparse Approximation of Spatial Channel Model with Dictionary Learning

Abstract: In large antenna systems, traditional channel estimation is costly and infeasible in some situations. Compressive sensing was proposed to estimate the channel with fewer measurements. Most of the previous work uses a predefined discrete Fourier transform matrix or overcomplete Fourier transform matrix to approximate the channel. Then, a learned dictionary trained by K-singular value decomposition (K-SVD) was proposed and was proved superiority using orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) to reconstruct the sparse channel. However, with the development of compressive sensing, there are plenty of dictionary learning algorithms and sparse recovery algorithms. It is important to identify the effect and the performance of different algorithms when transforming the high dimensional channel vectors to low dimensional representations. In this thesis, we use a spatial channel model to generate channel vectors. Dictionaries are trained by K-SVD and method of optimal directions (MOD). Several sparse recovery algorithms are used to find the sparse approximation of the channel like OMP and gradient descent with sparsification (GraDeS). We present simulation results and discuss the performance of the various algorithms in terms of accuracy, sparsity, and complexity. We find that predefined dictionaries works with most of the algorithms in sparse recovery but learned dictionaries only work with pursuit algorithms, and only show superiority when the algorithm coincides with the algorithm in the sparse coding stage.