  Hybrid massive MIMO structures with reduced hardware complexity and power
consumption have been widely studied as a potential candidate for millimeter
wave (mmWave) communications. Channel estimators that require knowledge of the
array response, such as those using compressive sensing (CS) methods, may
suffer from performance degradation when array-inherent impairments bring
unknown phase errors and gain errors to the antenna elements. In this paper, we
design matrix completion (MC)-based channel estimation schemes which are robust
against the array-inherent impairments. We first design an open-loop training
scheme that can sample entries from the effective channel matrix randomly and
is compatible with the phase shifter-based hybrid system. Leveraging the
low-rank property of the effective channel matrix, we then design a channel
estimator based on the generalized conditional gradient (GCG) framework and the
alternating minimization (AltMin) approach. The resulting estimator is immune
to array-inherent impairments and can be implemented to systems with any array
shapes for its independence of the array response. In addition, we extend our
design to sample a transformed channel matrix following the concept of
inductive matrix completion (IMC), which can be solved efficiently using our
proposed estimator and achieve similar performance with a lower requirement of
the dynamic range of the transmission power per antenna. Numerical results
demonstrate the advantages of our proposed MC-based channel estimators in terms
of estimation performance, computational complexity and robustness against
array-inherent impairments over the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP)-based CS
channel estimator.
