This letter considers a two-panel massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system, where the base station (BS) is equipped with two antenna panels that may use different frequency bands for communication. By exploiting the geometric relationships between antenna panels, efficient channel inference methods across antenna panels are proposed to reduce the overhead of real-time channel estimation. Four scenarios are considered, namely far-field free-space, near-field free-space, multi-path sharing far-field scatterers, and multi-path sharing near-field scatterers. For both far-field and near-field free-space scenarios, we show that the channel of one panel can be fully inferred from that of the other panel, as long as the multi-path components (MPCs) composing the channel can be resolved. On the other hand, for the multi-path scenarios sharing far-field or near-field scatterers, only the angles or range of angles of the MPCs can be inferred, respectively. Simulation results based on commercial 3D ray-tracing software are presented to validate our developed channel inference techniques.

翻译：本文考虑了一种双面板大规模多输入多输出（MIMO）通信系统，其中基站（BS）配备两个天线面板，它们可能使用不同频段进行通信。通过利用天线面板之间的几何关系，提出了跨面板的高效信道推断方法，以降低实时信道估计的开销。考虑了四种场景，即远场自由空间、近场自由空间、共享远场散射体的多径场景以及共享近场散射体的多径场景。针对远场和近场自由空间场景，我们证明只要构成信道的多径分量（MPC）能够被分辨，一个面板的信道就可以从另一个面板的信道完全推断出来。另一方面，对于共享远场或近场散射体的多径场景，则只能分别推断出MPC的角度或角度范围。基于商业三维射线追踪软件的仿真结果验证了我们所开发的信道推断技术。