Low-Complexity Implementation of Channel Estimation for ESPAR-OFDM Receiver

Electronically steerable parasitic array radiator (ESPAR) antenna is a novel low-cost technique to gain comparable diversity order to that of using multiple antennas while maintaining one radio frequency (RF) front-end, low power consumption, and simple wiring at the mobile receiver. It has huge potential to realize high energy efficiency for multiple and massive antennas systems. The main drawback of the ESPAR based OFDM system is that the channel estimation (CE) usually should be realized in time-domain with a huge computational complexity (CC) because the received signal to each parasitic element is overlapped each other both in frequency and time domain. This article will propose three ways to reduce the complexity of CE for the ESPAR-OFDM system. The parallel multi-column compressive sensing (CS) algorithm was first introduced to detect all locations of channel impulse response simultaneously using one small segment of sensing matrix. Furthermore, by exploiting the symmetrical properties of Digital Fourier transform (DFT), the size of matrix to decrease the CC of matrix operation. Finally, by selecting a small set of row vectors of sensing matrix at the receiver side, the CC involved in CS algorithm can be reduced. From the analysis and simulated results, the proposed method can obtain more than 90% CC reduction for CE of ESPAR-OFDM receiver can be confirmed.