Simplified Temporal Convolutional-based Channel Estimation for a WiFi Vehicular Communication Channel

Abstract

North-West University, Faculty of Engineering, Potchefstroom Campus, 2025Channel estimation in vehicular communication is a crucial element in the advancement of intelligent transportation systems. However, the use of pilot signals in the IEEE 802.11p standard is insufficient for accurate channel estimation in high mobility scenarios. Data pilot-aided (DPA) estimation helps address this, but suffers from demapping errors. We propose a simplified Temporal Convolutional Network-based estimator (DPA-TCN) trained on a mixed signal-to-noise ratio dataset to improve estimation performance and reduce computational complexity. Our DPA-TCN estimator achieves a bit error rate comparable to a state-of-the-art long-short-term memory network with DPA and temporal averaging (LSTM-DPA-TA) while reducing the complexity of the model by approximately 65%. Index Terms—channel estimation, deep learning, IEEE 802.11p, TCN, vehicle-to-vehicle, wireless communications.