Performance and Complexity Comparison of Doppler Spread Estimation for WCDMA Systems

Abstract: In cellular communication systems, the estimation of Doppler spread has a wide range of applications such as handoff, channel assignment scheme, adaptivetransmission, power control, etc. A great quantity of Doppler spread estimation algorithms have been proposed in the literature. But there has been few investigations which gives a comprehensive comparison of these algorithms. Therefore, it is of great signicance to compare and evaluate the performance of the existing algorithms in the same simulation framework. In this report, the uplink of WCDMA is considered. Four different types of Doppler spread estimation algorithms are evaluated and compared in a link level baseband simulator. The performance and the ability to implement are considered as the metrics for evaluation. Both Rayleigh and Rician fading channel model are applied, and the effect of speed, signal to noise ratio, Rician factor and the angle of arrived line of sight component are also tested. Moreover, the computational complexity is analysed to evaluate the practical value for implementation.