Beamspace ESPRIT-D for Joint 3D Angle and Delay Estimation for Joint Localization and Communication at MmWave

In this paper, we address the complex task of estimating the parameters for multiple propagation paths of realistic millimeter wave (mmWave) channels. We propose a solution with a reasonable computational complexity while providing high accuracy, which is required for precise positioning in joint localization and communication systems. We introduce an innovative method termed ESPRIT-D - beamspace Estimation of Signal Parameters via Rotational Invariance Techniques with a Dictionary based solution. It exploits a model for the mmWave multipath channel accounting for filtering effects, represented as a 5D tensor. Our solution develops a modification of beamspace ESPRIT that can operate with analog beamforming to extract the directions of departure and arrival in azimuth and elevation, while retrieving the delay estimates by a greedy sparse recovery method. We evaluated the proposed method using channel realizations generated by ray-tracing simulation of an outdoor environment, demonstrating an average angular error below 0.01° for line-of-sight (LoS) paths and 0.1° for nonline-of-sight (NLoS) components. The accuracy in delay estimation achieves an average of
$3\mathrm{e}^{-10}\mathrm{s}$
. Compared with state-of-the-art (SOTA), our algorithm exhibits a 10× improvement in estimation accuracy.