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``Approximate Channel Identification via Delta-Signed Correlation"

J. Balakrishnan, W. A. Sethares and C.R. Johnson, Jr.

International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 309-323, May 2002.

Abstract

A method of approximate channel identification is proposed that is based on a simplification of the correlation estimator. Despite the numerical simplification (no multiplications or additions are required, only comparisons and an accumulator), the performance of the proposed estimator is not significantly worse than that of the standard correlation estimator. A free (user selectable) parameter moves ``smoothly'' from a situation with a small sum-squared channel estimation error but hard-to-identify channel peaks, to one with a larger sum-squared estimation error but easy-to-identify channel peaks. The proposed estimator is shown to be biased and its behavior is analyzed in a number of situations. Applications of the proposed estimator to sparsity detection, symbol timing recovery, and to the initialization of blind equalizers are suggested.