Delay-Doppler Domain Channel Estimation: What if Sparsity is Unknown?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yang, Zijian, Shao, Yulin, Hou, Fen, Ma, Shaodan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Yang, Zijian
Shao, Yulin
Hou, Fen
Ma, Shaodan
author_facet Yang, Zijian
Shao, Yulin
Hou, Fen
Ma, Shaodan
contents Sparsity in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain enables efficient channel estimation, but the realization-wise sparsity level is rarely known in advance, and it fluctuates. What if we could estimate the channel without ever knowing how many delays or Dopplers are active? This paper answers that question. We propose a sparsity-agnostic structured estimator that requires no prior knowledge of delay or Doppler sparsity budgets. The key idea is to exploit the Cartesian-product structure of DD support (active delays share a common Doppler set) and to select the support dimensions directly from the data via the Bayesian information criterion. We instantiate the framework on an affine frequency division multiplexing system, where the observation model naturally admits an on-grid DD representation. Numerical results demonstrate that it recovers the exact support with high probability and achieves near-oracle channel reconstruction accuracy, consistently outperforming fixed-budget baselines and sparse Bayesian learning. The approach is waveform-agnostic and offers a practical, adaptive solution for DD-domain channel estimation under unknown and time-varying sparsity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_00049
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Delay-Doppler Domain Channel Estimation: What if Sparsity is Unknown?
Yang, Zijian
Shao, Yulin
Hou, Fen
Ma, Shaodan
Information Theory
Sparsity in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain enables efficient channel estimation, but the realization-wise sparsity level is rarely known in advance, and it fluctuates. What if we could estimate the channel without ever knowing how many delays or Dopplers are active? This paper answers that question. We propose a sparsity-agnostic structured estimator that requires no prior knowledge of delay or Doppler sparsity budgets. The key idea is to exploit the Cartesian-product structure of DD support (active delays share a common Doppler set) and to select the support dimensions directly from the data via the Bayesian information criterion. We instantiate the framework on an affine frequency division multiplexing system, where the observation model naturally admits an on-grid DD representation. Numerical results demonstrate that it recovers the exact support with high probability and achieves near-oracle channel reconstruction accuracy, consistently outperforming fixed-budget baselines and sparse Bayesian learning. The approach is waveform-agnostic and offers a practical, adaptive solution for DD-domain channel estimation under unknown and time-varying sparsity.
title Delay-Doppler Domain Channel Estimation: What if Sparsity is Unknown?
topic Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00049