Super Resolution Channel Estimation by Using Spread Spectrum Signal and Atomic Norm Minimization

Compressed Sensing (CS) is known to provide better channel estimation performance than the Least Square (LS) method for channel estimation. However, multipath delays may not be resolved if they span between the grids. This grid problem of CS is an obstacle to super resolution channel estimation. An Atomic Norm (AN) minimization is one of the methods for estimating continuous parameters. The AN minimization can successfully recover a spectrally sparse signal from a few time-domain samples even though the dictionary is continuous. There are studies showing that the AN minimization method has better resolution than conventional CS methods. In this paper, we propose a channel estimation method based on the AN minimization for Spread Spectrum (SS) systems. The accuracy of the proposed channel estimation is compared with the conventional LS method and Dantzig Selector (DS) of the CS. In addition to the application of channel estimation in wireless communication, we also show that the AN minimization can be applied to Global Positioning System (GPS) using Gold sequence.