Accuracy of specular path estimates with ESPRIT and RiMAX in the presence of measurement-based diffuse multipath components

This paper presents performance results of three high-resolution parameters estimation algorithms: ESPRIT, SAGE and RiMAX. MIMO indoor radio channels which include measurement-based time-delay diffuse multipath scattering (DMC) were emulated to evaluate the estimation performance of both algorithms. The impact of the DMC on the parameter estimation accuracy is studied by adjusting its power with respect to the specular component. For all discussed scenarios, it is clearly demonstrated that RiMAX outperforms ESPRIT and SAGE which do not include DMC estimation into their data model. The preliminary results clearly highlight the importance of DMC and the necessity to account for its presence in data models to accurately estimate the channel parameters. Otherwise, very poor estimates of the coherent component parameters are expected which would in turn result in wronged propagation prediction models.