Robust Channel Order Selection Based on Spectral Matching

Abstract

In this paper, a new approach to channel order selection of single-input multiple-output (SIMO), finite impulse response (FIR) channels is proposed for blind channel estimation. The approach utilizes cross spectral density (CSD) of the channel outputs, and minimizes the distance between two CSD's, one calculated non-parametrically from the observed output data, and the other calculated from the blindly estimated channel parameters. The CSD criterion is numerically tested on randomly generated SIMO-FIR channels, and shown to be very effective compared to existing channel order selection methods especially under low SNR settings. Blind estimates of the channels with the selected channel order also show superiority of the CSD criterion.