Near-Field MIMO LoS Channel Recovery Under User Antenna Asymmetry
Near-field (N-F) line-of-sight (LoS) MIMO channels admit a compact representation through a small number of geometric parameters describing the relative transceiver geometry, enabling low-overhead channel acquisition without estimating the full channel matrix. This paper considers downlink (DL) channel acquisition under practical asymmetric user-equipment (UE) antenna capabilities with multiple DL receive antennas, but only a single active uplink (UL) transmit chain. In this setting, UL observations across the large BS aperture enable accurate estimation of the relative location of the UL-active UE antenna but are insufficient to determine the orientation of the entire UE array. We propose a two-stage geometry-based N-F LoS MIMO channel acquisition framework that distributes the estimation of the channel-defining geometric parameters between the BS and UE. First, a single UL pilot sequence enables the BS to estimate two BS-side reference angles that parameterize the relative location of the UL-active UE antenna. The BS conveys these estimates to the UE and transmits two DL pilot sequences, from which the UE estimates the remaining array-orientation parameter. We derive Cramer-Rao lower bounds (CRLBs) for the first-stage parameters and a first-order error-covariance approximation for the UE orientation that explicitly captures the propagation of first-stage estimation uncertainty. Numerical results characterize the resulting error propagation and demonstrate accurate estimation of the geometric parameters and reconstruction of the LoS MIMO channel using one UL and two DL pilot sequences.