A Generative Denoising Approach for Near-Field XL-MIMO Channel Estimation

In this paper, we investigate the near-field (NF) channel estimation (CE) for extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) systems. Considering the pronounced NF effects in XL-MIMO communications, we first establish a joint angle-distance (AD) domain-based spherical-wavefront physical channel model that captures the inherent sparsity of XL-MIMO channels in the NF region. Leveraging the sparsity of the channel, the CE is approached as a task of reconstructing sparse signals. Anchored in this framework, we first propose a compressed sensing algorithm to acquire a preliminary channel estimation. Harnessing the powerful latent representation capability of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), we further propose a GenAI-based approach to refine the estimated channel by employing advanced image denoising techniques. Specifically, we perceive the estimated channel as a noisy color image. Then, we derive the evidence lower bound (ELBO) of the design objective utilizing variational inference and reparameterization techniques, and propose a generative diffusion probabilistic model (GDM) dedicated to denoising. Experimental results indicate that the proposed GDM is capable of offering substantial performance gain in CE compared to existing benchmark approaches in NF XL-MIMO systems.