Empirical Characteristic Function Based Estimation of Multiple Scattering Channel Parameters

Multiple scattering propagation channel is a physically motivated generic model whose special cases include Rayleigh, Rice, double-Rayleigh and "leaky keyhole" channels. Estimation of the parameters of its amplitude distribution is still largely an unexplored problem. In this paper, several novel estimators based on the empirical characteristic (ECF) function are derived. The mathematical form of the considered signal model makes the ECF approach ideally suited for the estimation problem at hand, whereas the maximum-likelihood (ME) estimator is analytically and computationally intractable. Furthermore, it can be easily extended to other similar signal models. By simulations it is shown that the derived ECF estimators have at least as small mean square error as the previously proposed moment-based approaches