9 research outputs found
Time Delay Estimation from Low Rate Samples: A Union of Subspaces Approach
Time delay estimation arises in many applications in which a multipath medium
has to be identified from pulses transmitted through the channel. Various
approaches have been proposed in the literature to identify time delays
introduced by multipath environments. However, these methods either operate on
the analog received signal, or require high sampling rates in order to achieve
reasonable time resolution. In this paper, our goal is to develop a unified
approach to time delay estimation from low rate samples of the output of a
multipath channel. Our methods result in perfect recovery of the multipath
delays from samples of the channel output at the lowest possible rate, even in
the presence of overlapping transmitted pulses. This rate depends only on the
number of multipath components and the transmission rate, but not on the
bandwidth of the probing signal. In addition, our development allows for a
variety of different sampling methods. By properly manipulating the low-rate
samples, we show that the time delays can be recovered using the well-known
ESPRIT algorithm. Combining results from sampling theory with those obtained in
the context of direction of arrival estimation methods, we develop necessary
and sufficient conditions on the transmitted pulse and the sampling functions
in order to ensure perfect recovery of the channel parameters at the minimal
possible rate. Our results can be viewed in a broader context, as a sampling
theorem for analog signals defined over an infinite union of subspaces
Multichannel Sampling of Pulse Streams at the Rate of Innovation
We consider minimal-rate sampling schemes for infinite streams of delayed and
weighted versions of a known pulse shape. The minimal sampling rate for these
parametric signals is referred to as the rate of innovation and is equal to the
number of degrees of freedom per unit time. Although sampling of infinite pulse
streams was treated in previous works, either the rate of innovation was not
achieved, or the pulse shape was limited to Diracs. In this paper we propose a
multichannel architecture for sampling pulse streams with arbitrary shape,
operating at the rate of innovation. Our approach is based on modulating the
input signal with a set of properly chosen waveforms, followed by a bank of
integrators. This architecture is motivated by recent work on sub-Nyquist
sampling of multiband signals. We show that the pulse stream can be recovered
from the proposed minimal-rate samples using standard tools taken from spectral
estimation in a stable way even at high rates of innovation. In addition, we
address practical implementation issues, such as reduction of hardware
complexity and immunity to failure in the sampling channels. The resulting
scheme is flexible and exhibits better noise robustness than previous
approaches
Identification of Parametric Underspread Linear Systems and Super-Resolution Radar
Identification of time-varying linear systems, which introduce both
time-shifts (delays) and frequency-shifts (Doppler-shifts), is a central task
in many engineering applications. This paper studies the problem of
identification of underspread linear systems (ULSs), whose responses lie within
a unit-area region in the delay Doppler space, by probing them with a known
input signal. It is shown that sufficiently-underspread parametric linear
systems, described by a finite set of delays and Doppler-shifts, are
identifiable from a single observation as long as the time bandwidth product of
the input signal is proportional to the square of the total number of delay
Doppler pairs in the system. In addition, an algorithm is developed that
enables identification of parametric ULSs from an input train of pulses in
polynomial time by exploiting recent results on sub-Nyquist sampling for time
delay estimation and classical results on recovery of frequencies from a sum of
complex exponentials. Finally, application of these results to super-resolution
target detection using radar is discussed. Specifically, it is shown that the
proposed procedure allows to distinguish between multiple targets with very
close proximity in the delay Doppler space, resulting in a resolution that
substantially exceeds that of standard matched-filtering based techniques
without introducing leakage effects inherent in recently proposed compressed
sensing-based radar methods.Comment: Revised version of a journal paper submitted to IEEE Trans. Signal
Processing: 30 pages, 17 figure