Efficient Channel Estimation for Aerial Wireless Communications

We present a technique to jointly estimate the channel taps and the frequency offset due to the Doppler effect of a special class of doubly dispersive aeronautical channels. The algorithm includes the use of pulse repetition techniques at the transmitter and the “power method” subspace iteration at the receiver. We show that transmitting constant-amplitude zero-autocorrelation sequences for channel sounding yields estimators with low computational complexity. Numerical simulations indicate performance comparable to the estimation-theoretic lower bound.