Collaborative and Passive Channel Gain Estimation in Fading Environments

Abstract

Dynamic spectrum access techniques are typically aided by knowledge of the wireless channel gains among participating radios, as this knowledge allows the potential interference impact of any radio’s transmissions on its neighbors to be quantified. We present a technique for collaborative inference of the channel gains which relies solely on the radios monitoring their aggregate transmitted and received energies as they transmit their data packets. We demonstrate that through low data-rate exchange of these energy metrics among bursty networks, the gains can be jointly estimated within a dB and with low latency on the order of seconds. In particular, we derive the best linear unbiased estimator (BLUE) for the gains. While this estimator relies on knowledge of fading parameters not known in practice, we propose a practical variant which achieves performance comparable to the BLUE in the realistic fading setting used in our simulations.