On measuring the delay profile and the directions of arrival by using super resolution algorithm

It is well known that super resolution algorithms, e.g. the MUSIC and ESPRIT algorithms are very powerful tools to estimate signal parameters. The application of these algorithms to the measurement of the delay profile (DP) and the directions of arrival (DOA) in severe multipath environment is attempted. In such an environment, incident waves are highly correlated and the number of effective waves may be beyond the capability of these algorithms. The objective of this study is to investigate the applicability of these algorithms in real multipath environments that may include the above mentioned bad conditions. To approach this objective, spatial and temporal multipath channel parameters for realistic environments were modeled by the image method (a kind of ray tracing method), and then the estimated parameters from these models were compared with the original parameters. In the computer simulation, two significant results were found, the first one was that the super resolution algorithms can perform their work even in severe multipath environments, and the second was the resolution of estimation is not lower than that of the inverse DFT (IDFT) method.