Ray-Tracing-Assisted High-Resolution Parameter Estimation for Dynamic Millimeter-Wave Channels

An accurate description of the wireless channel is essential to the development of modern wireless systems. In order to mathematically model the propagation channel, one important prior step often done is high-resolution parameter estimation. The estimation accuracy of this step has a significant impact on how well the channel models can represent reality. In this paper, we address this by improving the estimation performance of the well-known space-alternating generalized expectation maximization algorithm by using ray tracing estimation results in its initialization step. By using the proposed method to estimate multi-path components from raw measurement data gathered from an outdoor measurement campaign, we show that the resulting algorithm gives an improvement in estimation accuracy and lowers computational complexity.