Channel Matrix Recursion for Blind Effective Channel Order Estimation

Channel order estimation is a critical task for blind system identification. The performance of the blind system identification algorithms depends on the accuracy and robustness of the channel order estimation. In this paper, a new effective channel order estimation algorithm with high accuracy and robustness is proposed for single-input multi-output (SIMO) systems. The proposed algorithm is guaranteed to find the true channel order for the noise-free case and it performs significantly better than the alternative algorithms for noisy observations. This algorithm shows a consistent performance when the number of observations, channels and channel order are changed. The proposed algorithm is integrated with the least squares smoothing (LSS) algorithm for blind identification of the channel coefficients. Comparisons are done with a variety of different algorithms including linear prediction (LP) based methods. It is shown that significant gain can be obtained compared to the alternative approaches in effective channel order estimation.