Location-Aware and Superimposed-Pilot Based Channel Estimation of Sparse HAP Radio Communication Channels

A superimposed (arithmetically added) Pilot (SiP) sequence based channel estimation method for beamforming assisted multi-antenna High Altitude Platform (HAP) land mobile radio communication systems is proposed, which exploits the prior available information of users' spatial location, density of users, and beam-width of HAP directional antenna. A thorough characterization of HAP sparse multipath radio propagation channels' is presented in first part of the paper, where mathematical relationship of HAP antenna beam-width with channel's delay span and optimal length of SiP base sequence are presented. Further, a location information aided and low- power SiP sequence based Stage-wise Orthogonal Match Pursuit (StOMP) algorithm is proposed for estimation of channels from single-antenna user terminals to beamforming assisted large scale multiple-antenna HAP. A thorough analysis on the basis of Normalized Channel Mean Square Error (NCMSE) and Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of proposed method is presented; where the effect of channels' sparsity level, Pilot-to-Information power Ratio (PIR), beam-width of HAP's directional antenna, amount of HAP antenna elements, density of interfering users, and spatial location of active user terminal are thoroughly studied. A comparison of the proposed method with a notable reference technique available in the literature is also presented.