Alternative Channel Charting Techniques in Cellular Wireless Communications

TL;DR

This paper compares traditional and novel algorithms for channel charting in cellular wireless communications, evaluating their accuracy, computational efficiency, and visual quality of the resulting channel maps.

Contribution

It introduces and assesses the performance of the Bartlett's algorithm for estimating both angle of arrival and distance, comparing it with existing methods including MUSIC.

Findings

MUSIC algorithm achieves high performance in estimating both $ heta$ and $ ho$.

Minimum Norm algorithm has higher computational complexity.

Bartlett's algorithm performs similarly to MVDR and Minimum Norm in accuracy.

Abstract

We investigate the use of conventional angle of arrival (AoA) algorithms the Bartlett's algorithm, the Minimum Variance Distortion Response (MVDR or Capon) algorithm, and the Minimum Norm algorithm for estimating the AoA $\theta$ together with our previously introduced algorithms linear regression (LR), inverse of the root sum squares of channel coefficients (ISQ), as well as a novel use of the MUSIC algorithm for estimating the distance from the base station, $\rho$ in the context of channel charting. We carry out evaluations in terms of the visual quality of the channel charts, the dimensionality reduction performance measures trustworthiness (TW) and connectivity (CT), as well as the execution time of the algorithms. We find that although the Bartlett's algorithm, MVDR, and Minimum Norm algorithms have sufficiently close performance to techniques we studied earlier, the Minimum Norm algorithm has significantly higher computational complexity than the other two. Previously, we found that the use of the MUSIC algorithm for estimation of both $\theta$ and $\rho$ has a very high performance. In this paper, we investigated and quantified the performance of the Bartlett algorithm in its use for estimating both $\theta$ and $\rho$, similar to the our previously introduced technique of using MUSIC for estimating both.