Joint Timing Offset and Channel Estimation for Multi-user UFMC Uplink

TL;DR

This paper introduces a joint timing offset and channel estimation method for multi-user UFMC uplink that leverages atomic norm minimization to improve performance and reduce overhead in machine-type communications.

Contribution

It presents a novel joint estimation technique using atomic norm minimization tailored for UFMC, enhancing synchronization and channel estimation efficiency.

Findings

Significant performance improvement over existing methods

Effective reduction in estimation overhead

Enhanced sparsity exploitation in continuous frequency domain

Abstract

Universal filtered multi-carrier (UFMC), which groups and filters subcarriers before transmission, is a potential multi-carrier modulation technique investigated for the emerging Machine-Type Communications (MTC). Considering the relaxed timing synchronization requirement of UFMC, we design a novel joint timing synchronization and channel estimation method for multi-user UFMC uplink transmission. Aiming at reducing overhead for higher system performance, the joint estimation problem is formulated using atomic norm minimization that enhances the sparsity of timing offset in the continuous frequency domain. Simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve considerable performance gain, as compared with its counterparts.