Adaptive Subarray Segmentation: A New Paradigm of Spatial Non-Stationary Near-Field Channel Estimation for XL-MIMO Systems

To address the complexities of spatial non-stationary (SnS) effects and spherical wave propagation in near-field channel estimation (CE) for extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) systems, this paper proposes an SnS-aware CE framework based on adaptive subarray partitioning. We first investigate spherical wave propagation and various SnS characteristics and construct an SnS near-field channel model for XL-MIMO systems. Due to the limitations of uniform subarray patterns in capturing SnS, we analyze the adverse effects of the non-ideal array segmentation (over- and under-segmentation) on CE accuracy. To counter these issues, we develop a dynamic hybrid beamforming-assisted power-based subarray segmentation paradigm (DHBF-PSSP), which integrates power measurements with a dynamic hybrid beamforming structure to enable joint subarray partitioning and decoupling. A power-adaptive subarray segmentation (PASS) algorithm leverages the statistical properties of power profiles, while subarray decoupling is achieved via a subarray segmentation-based sampling method (SS-SM) under radio frequency (RF) chain constraints. For subarray CE, we propose a subarray segmentation-based assorted block sparse Bayesian learning algorithm under the multiple measurement vectors framework (SS-ABSBL-MMV). This algorithm exploits angular-domain block sparsity under a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) codebook and inter-subcarrier structured sparsity. Simulation results confirm that the proposed framework outperforms existing methods in CE performance.