Deep Learning-Based Channel Estimation
This addresses channel estimation for communication systems, but it is incremental as it applies existing deep image processing methods to a known problem.
The paper tackles channel estimation in communication systems by treating the channel response as a 2D image and using deep learning techniques like super-resolution and restoration, achieving results comparable to MMSE with full statistics and better than ALMMSE.
In this paper, we present a deep learning (DL) algorithm for channel estimation in communication systems. We consider the time-frequency response of a fast fading communication channel as a two-dimensional image. The aim is to find the unknown values of the channel response using some known values at the pilot locations. To this end, a general pipeline using deep image processing techniques, image super-resolution (SR) and image restoration (IR) is proposed. This scheme considers the pilot values, altogether, as a low-resolution image and uses an SR network cascaded with a denoising IR network to estimate the channel. Moreover, an implementation of the proposed pipeline is presented. The estimation error shows that the presented algorithm is comparable to the minimum mean square error (MMSE) with full knowledge of the channel statistics and it is better than ALMMSE (an approximation to linear MMSE). The results confirm that this pipeline can be used efficiently in channel estimation.