Iterative Hard Thresholding with Combined Variable Step Size & Momentum-Based Estimator for Wireless Communication Systems with Dynamic Sparse Channels

The channel of the broadband wireless communications system can be modeled as a dynamic sparse channel. Such a channel is difficult to reconstruct by using linear channel estimators that are normally employed for dense channels’ estimation because of their lack of capacity to use the inherent channel’s sparsity. This paper focuses on reconstructing this type of time-varying sparse channel by extending a recently proposed dynamic channel estimator. Specifically, variable step size’s mechanism and variable momentum parameter are incorporated into traditional Iterative Hard Thresholding-based channel estimator to develop the proposed Iterative Hard Thresholding with Combined Variable Step Size and Momentum (IHT-wCVSSnM)-based estimator. Computer simulations carried out in the context of a wireless communication system operating in a dynamic sparse channel, show that the proposed IHT-wCVSSnM-based estimator performs better than all the other estimators significantly. However, the computational complexity cost of the proposed estimator is slightly higher than the closely performing channel estimator. Nevertheless, the inherent complexity cost of the proposed estimator could be compromised in a situation where the system’s performance is of higher priority when compared with the computational complexity cost.