IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 3, NO.

6, JUNE 1999

175

Moment-Method Estimation of the Ricean

AbstractIn many radio propagation environments, the timevarying envelope of the received signal can be statistically described by a Ricean distribution. Traditional methods for estimating the Ricean -factor from measured power versus time are relatively cumbersome and time consuming. We describe a simple and rapid approach wherein the -factor is an exact function of moments estimated from time-series data. Comparisons with empirical distributions for xed wireless paths validate the method.

-Factor

L. J. Greenstein, Fellow, IEEE, D. G. Michelson, Senior Member, IEEE, and V. Erceg, Senior Member, IEEE

II. FORMULATION We can characterize the complex signal path gain of a narrowband wireless channel by a frequency-at (but possibly time varying) response (1) is a complex constant and is a complex, zerowhere mean random time variation caused by vehicular motion, wind-blown foliage, etc. This description applies to a particular frequency segment (narrower than the correlation bandwidth of the channel) and a particular time segment (long compared to the correlation time of the short-term uctuations).1 Both the may constant and the parameters of the random process change from one such timefrequency segment to another. The rst step in estimating the Ricean -factor is to recast (1) in terms of two moments which can be estimated from measurements of received power versus time. The correspondis given by The true value of the ing power gain rst moment or time average of (as distinct from the value calculated from nite data) is (2) is a zero-mean random process, the last term Since reduces to zero. Dening (3) we can write (4) The second moment of interest is the rms uctuation of about The true value of this uctuation (as distinct from the value calculated from nite data) is

K -factor, wireless communications.

Index Terms Channel

model,

fading

channel,

Ricean

I. INTRODUCTION N MANY radio propagation environments, the complex path gain at any frequency consists of a xed component plus a zero-mean uctuating component. If the uctuation is complex Gaussian, as it often is, the time-varying envelope of the composite gain will have a Ricean distribution. The dening parameter of this distribution is the K-factor, which is the power ratio of the xed and uctuating components. The details have been described in [1], [2], and elsewhere. It is possible to estimate the Ricean -factor of a signal from measurements of received power versus time. One approach is to compute the distributions of the measured data, then compare the result to a set of hypothesis distributions using a suitable goodness-of-t test, as described by Greenwood and Hanzo [2]. Another is to compute a maximum-likelihood estimate using an expectation/maximization (EM) algorithm, as suggested by Marzetta [3]. However, both these approaches are relatively cumbersome and time consuming. Here, we describe a simple and rapid method based on calculating the rst and second moments of the timeseries data. For perfect moment estimates of Ricean envelopes, the method is exact. A similar method which uses the rst and second moments of eld strength rather than of power has been described by Talukdar and Lawing [4]. In that case, the -factor can only be obtained implicitly, by equating a ratio of the measured moments to a complicated function of . By contrast, the method described here yields an explicit and quite simple in terms of the measured moments. expression for

(5) Under our assumption that ian, this can be shown to be is zero-mean complex Gauss(6) In each of (4) and (6), the left-hand side can be estimated from data and the right-hand side is a function of the two quantities we seek. Combining these equations, we can solve and yielding for (7)
the same time, the duration of the time segment should be limited so the envelope distribution will not be affected by longer term changes in the fading process (e.g., diurnal effects for xed terminals or locale changes for mobile terminals).
1 At

Manuscript received January 15, 1999. The associate editor coordinating the review of this letter and approving it for publication was Prof. Y. BarNess. L. J. Greenstein and V. Erceg are with AT&T Labs-Research, Wireless Communications Research Department, Red Bank, NJ 07701 USA (e-mail: ljg@research.att.com). D. G. Michelson is a Consultant to AT&T Wireless Services, Wireless Local Technologies Group, Redmond, WA 98052 USA. Publisher Item Identier S 1089-7798(99)05513-1.

10897798/99$10.00 1999 IEEE

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IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 3, NO. 6, JUNE 1999

[1, eq. (5.60)] is not present in (9). The -factor and average sufce to determine the Ricean envelope power gain distribution.

III. VALIDATION For each of several xed wireless paths located in suburban New Jersey, we collected 5-min time sequences of received power at 1.9 GHz. For each path, we can compute a cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the measured samples. This is the empirical CDF of the received envelope. We can also and , as described above, and then compute compute a Ricean distribution that should match the empirical one. Comparisons are shown in Fig. 1 for four typical cases. Each corresponds to a particular frequency and transmitreceive path. In each case, the results show that the Ricean distribution obtained using the estimated moments is quite close to the empirical one. REFERENCES (8) Finally, the Ricean values into -factor is obtained by substituting these (9) as dened here is twice the RF power of the Note that uctuating term, which is why the customary factor of 2 [see
[1] J. D. Parsons, The Mobile Radio Propagation Channel. New York: Wiley, 1992, pp. 134136. [2] D. Greenwood and L. Hanzo, Characterization of mobile radio channels, in Mobile Radio Communications, R. Steele, Ed. London, U.K.: Pentech, 1992, pp. 163185. [3] T. L. Marzetta, EM algorithm for estimating the parameters of a multivariate complex Rician density for polarimetric SAR, in Proc. ICASSP96, Detroit, MI, May 912, 1995, pp. 36513654. [4] K. K. Talukdar and W. D. Lawing, Estimation of the parameters of the Rice distribution, J. Acoust. Soc. Amer., vol. 89, pp. 11931197, Mar. 1991.

Fig. 1. CDFs for four typical cases, xed wireless channels. Solid lines: CDFs using measured data; dashed lines: Ricean CDFs with -factors determined by the moment method.

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