  In this paper, adaptive pilot beam sequence design for channel estimation in
large millimeter-wave (mmWave) MIMO systems is considered. By exploiting the
sparsity of mmWave MIMO channels with the virtual channel representation and
imposing a Markovian random walk assumption on the physical movement of the
line-of-sight (LOS) and reflection clusters, it is shown that the sparse
channel estimation problem in large mmWave MIMO systems reduces to a sequential
detection problem that finds the locations and values of the non-zero-valued
bins in a two-dimensional rectangular grid, and the optimal adaptive pilot
design problem can be cast into the framework of a partially observable Markov
decision process (POMDP). Under the POMDP framework, an optimal adaptive pilot
beam sequence design method is obtained to maximize the accumulated
transmission data rate for a given period of time. Numerical results are
provided to validate our pilot signal design method and they show that the
proposed method yields good performance.
