Fundamental limits via CRB of semi-blind channel estimation in Massive MIMO systems

This paper investigates the asymptotic behavior of the deterministic and stochastic Cramér-Rao Bounds (CRB) for semi-blind channel estimation in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. We derive and analyze mathematically tractable expressions for both metrics under various asymptotic regimes, which govern the growth rates of the number of antennas, the number of users, the training sequence length, and the transmission block length. Unlike the existing work, our results show that the CRB can be made arbitrarily small as the transmission block length increases, but only when the training sequence length grows at the same rate and the number of users remains fixed. However, if the number of training sequences remains proportional to the number of users, the channel estimation error is always lower-bounded by a non-vanishing constant. Numerical results are presented to support our findings and demonstrate the advantages of semi-blind channel estimation in reducing the required number of training sequences.