Blind identification of multipath channels: a parametric subspace approach

In this paper, blind identification of single-input multiple-output (SIMO) systems using second-order statistics (SOS) only is considered. Using the assumption of a specular multipath channel, we investigate a parametric variant of the so-called subspace method. Nonparametric subspace-based methods require precise estimation of the model order; overestimation of the model order leads to inconsistent channel estimates. We show that the parametric subspace method gives consistent channel estimates when only an upper bound of the channel order is known. A new algorithm, which exploits parametric information on the channel structure, is presented. A statistical performance analysis of the proposed parametric subspace criterion is presented; limited Monte Carlo experiments show that the proposed algorithm is second-order optimal for a large class of channels.