Nonparametric Doppler spread estimation for flat fading channels

Accurate estimation of the Doppler spread of a mobile radio channel is of significant value as it reveals the channel´s rate of change. This information can then be used to improve the performance of many wireless communication subsystems. In this paper, a nonparametric technique is proposed to estimate the maximum Doppler frequency of narrow band fading channels. Moreover, a computationally efficient periodogram-based approach is formulated, and its finite sample performance is assessed and compared to parametric covariance-based estimators via computer simulations. On the basis of these comparisons, we claim that the simplicity of the proposed method, its accurate performance for small sample sizes in a wide range of propagation scenarios, and its robustness to low SNR conditions make it a strong competitor to the parametric approaches.