Median filtering for power estimation in mobile communication systems

In mobile communications, accurate power estimation is important for power control and handoff decisions. Power estimation algorithms aim to filter out the fast variation in the received power due to multipath fading, and should ideally exhibit very low complexity. For this reason, linear filtering (local mean) is almost exclusively used for power estimation in practice. We derive the maximum likelihood estimator in an idealized setting, and motivated by the statistical properties of the multipath signal, we also propose median filtering for power estimation. Simulations show promising results, indicating gains in RMSE and robustness to increased window size.