Low-Speed ADC Sampling Based High-Resolution Compressive Channel Estimation

Abstract: Broadband channel is often characterized by a sparse multipath channel where dominant multipath taps are widely separated in time, thereby resulting in a large delay spread. Traditionally, accurate channel estimation is done by sampling received signal by analog-to-digital converter (ADC) at Nyquist rate (high-speed ADC sampling) and then estimate all channel taps with high-resolution. However, traditional linear estimation methods have two mainly disadvantages: 1) demand of the high-speed ADC sampling rate which already exceeds the capability of current ADC and also the high-speed ADC is very expensive for regular wireless communications; 2) neglect the inherent channel sparsity and the low spectral efficiency wireless communication is unavoidable. To solve these challenges, in this paper, we propose a high-resolution compressive channel estimation method by using low-speed ADC sampling. Our proposed method can achieve close performance comparing with traditional sparse channel estimation methods. At the same time, the proposed method has following advantages: 1) reduce communication cost by utilizing cheap low-speed ADC; 2) improve spectral efficiency by extracting potential training signal resource. Numerical simulations confirm our proposed method using low-speed ADC sampling.