Scattering function and time-frequency signal processing

The estimation of the scattering function in a time-frequency selective fading mobile environment is considered. The scattering function explicitly reveals the time-frequency selective behavior of the fading channel under the well-known wide-sense stationary Gaussian process with uncorrelated scattering (WSSUS) assumption. We propose two classes of estimators based on a time-frequency framework that generalize the existing estimators while giving an extra freedom according to different criteria wanted to be achieved in the estimation of the scattering function. Instead of using the Woodward ambiguity function or symmetric ambiguity function, we use the generalized ambiguity function which comes from the general class of quadratic time-frequency distributions.