Energy and Spectrum Efficient Blind Equalization With Unknown Constellation for Air-to-Ground Multipath UAV Communications

In unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications, frequency-selective fading can severely deteriorate the quality of transmitted signal by generating undesired and disordered constellation diagrams due to scatters in the air-to-ground (ATG) mutipath channels. In this paper, we propose a low-overhead blind equalization method to combat frequency-selective fading in air-ground multipath UAV channels. Specifically, a pre-equalization method is proposed based on a constant modulus algorithm to restore the contour of the constellation diagram. Moreover, the similarity measure function and the difference measure function are derived using template matching to identify the constellation of M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation. Furthermore, we propose a weighted constant cross algorithm (WXA) to reduce the residual mean square error and construct a cross-shaped modulus value, by utilizing the statistical information of the identified normalized standard constellation diagrams and the equalizer output decision symbols’ weighting value. The proposed method requires less information and no training sequences and pilots, therefore, if achieves energy and spectrum efficient ATG multipath UAV communications. Simulation results show that the proposed WXA algorithm can reduce the residual mean square error convergence value between −22dB and −25dB, making it very useful for the equalization of the frequency-selective fading channel in typical UAV communication scenarios.