Scatterer Identification by Atomic Norm Minimization in Vehicular mm-Wave Propagation Channels

Sparse scatterer identification with atomic norm minimization (ANM) techniques in the delay-Doppler domain is investigated for a vehicle-to-infrastructure millimeter wave propagation channel. First, a two-dimensional ANM is formulated for jointly estimating the time-delays and Doppler frequencies associated with individual multipath components (MPCs) from short-time Fourier transformed measurements. The two-dimensional ANM is formulated as a semi-definite program and promotes sparsity in the delay-Doppler domain. The numerical complexity of the two-dimensional ANM limits the problem size which results in processing limitations on the time-frequency sample matrix size. Subsequently, a decoupled form of ANM is used together with a matrix pencil, allowing a larger sample matrix size. Simulations show that spatial clusters of a point-scatterers with small cluster spread are suitable to model specular reflection which result in significant MPCs and the successful extraction of their delay-Doppler parameters. The decoupled ANM is applied to vehicle-to-infrastructure channel sounder measurements in a sub-urban street in Vienna at 62 GHz. The obtained results show that the decoupled ANM successfully extracts the delay-Doppler parameters in high resolution for the channel’s significant MPCs.