Joint Estimation of Channel Parameters for MIMO Communication Systems

In the next generation mobile communication systems, high data rates and high capacity are expected if multiple antennas are used at both receive and transmit sides. Such a radio propagation channel constitutes a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. In a wireless MIMO system, it is possible to estimate channel parameters in a multipath environment by extending the classical parameter estimation methods to the joint space and time domain. In this paper, we propose a subspace-based approach to jointly estimate the angle-of-arrival (AOA), angle-of-departure (AOD) and delay-of-arrival (DOA) of digitally modulated multipath signals in MIMO communication systems. The novel approach uses a collection of estimates of a space-time manifold vector of the channel which utilizes a Khatri-Rao product to transfer the estimated channel response matrix to the classical model. Simulation results show that the proposed methods can achieve high resolution of channel parameters and resolve more multipath components than the number of array elements