Estimating the Number of Effective Multipath Components in Selective Fading Channels

This paper proposes a technique for estimating the number of effective multipath components in signals received through selective fading channels. The technique uses pattern recognition principles to estimate the number of cross-correlation peaks and passes this information to the peak detector to improve synchronization performance of an orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) system. The proposed technique gives more design flexibility, as it doesn´t require setting a detection threshold for peak amplitudes or knowledge of the number of expected peaks, and has better performance than a system whose detection parameters are firmly tuned through extensive simulations