We study multipath parameter estimation from orthogonal frequency division
multiplex signals transmitted over doubly dispersive mobile radio channels. We
are interested in cases where the transmission is long enough to suffer time
selectivity, but short enough such that the time variation can be accurately
modeled as depending only on per-tap linear phase variations due to Doppler
effects. We therefore concentrate on the estimation of the complex gain, delay
and Doppler offset of each tap of the multipath channel impulse response. We
show that the frequency domain channel coefficients for an entire packet can be
expressed as the superimposition of two-dimensional complex sinusoids. The
maximum likelihood estimate requires solution of a multidimensional non-linear
least squares problem, which is computationally infeasible in practice. We
therefore propose a low complexity suboptimal solution based on iterative
successive and parallel cancellation. First, initial delay/Doppler estimates
are obtained via successive cancellation. These estimates are then refined
using an iterative parallel cancellation procedure. We demonstrate via Monte
Carlo simulations that the root mean squared error statistics of our estimator
are very close to the Cramer-Rao lower bound of a single two-dimensional
sinusoid in Gaussian noise.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (26 pages,
9 figures and 3 tables