A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) consists of massive meta elements, which can improve the performance of future wireless communication systems. Existing RIS-aided channel estimation methods try to estimate the cascaded channel directly, incurring high computational and training overhead especially when the number of elements of RIS is extremely large. In this paper, we propose a cost-efficient channel estimation method via rank-one matrix factorization (MF). Specifically, if the RIS is employed near base station (BS), it is found that the RIS- aided channel can be factorized into a product of low-dimensional matrices. To estimate these factorized matrices, we propose alternating minimization and gradient descent approaches to obtain the near optimal solutions. Compared to directly estimating the cascaded channel, the proposed MF method reduces training overhead substantially. Finally, the numerical simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed MF method.
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