Rician K Factor Estimation for Wireless Communication Systems

In many radio propagation environments, a line of sight (LoS) component exists between the transmitter and the receiver. This way the time-varying envelope of the received signal can be described by a Rician distribution with Rician factor K. Therefore, precise and efficient methods of Rician K factor estimation are of substantial concern. In this paper we examine a Rician K factor estimator suitable for wireless communication systems. The estimator is based on the envelope of the unmodulated received signal and an expression between the Rician channel statistics and K factor is presented. We depict its functionality for fixed and low mobility systems, with different carrier frequencies, thus making the estimator candidate for use not only for specific systems such as mobile communications. In the examined cases of mobility and carrier usage, the estimator achieves very satisfactory results for low signal to noise ratio (SNR) values and K factor values.