Time-of-arrival (TOA) estimation based structured sparse channel estimation algorithm, with applications to digital TV receivers

We introduce a new structured channel impulse response (CIR) estimation method for sparse multipath channels where we demonstrate a robust way of restoring the pulse shape into the composite CIR. We call this novel CIR estimation method time-of-arrival based blended least squares (TOA-BLS) which uses symbol rate sampled signals, and it is based on blending correlation processing followed by TOA estimation in the frequency domain by the least squares based channel estimation. TOA estimation in the frequency domain is accomplished by estimating the AR model parameters by solving the forward and forward-backward linear prediction equations in the least squares sense. Simulation examples are drawn from the ATSC digital TV 8-VSB system (ATSC Digital Television Standard, A/53, 1995). The delay spread for digital TV systems can be as long as several hundred times the symbol duration; however, digital TV channels are sparse where there are only a few dominant multipaths.