A Novel Pilot Aided Time of Arrival (TOA) Estimation Algorithm for Vehicular OFDM Systems in Specular Wireless Channels

Channel estimation is vital for implementing schemes such as coherent detection and adaptive bit loading, which make OFDM an attractive PHY layer technology for vehicular wireless communications. However, knowledge of the exact time of arrival (TOA) information of the multi-path components of the vehicular wireless channel is required to achieve efficient channel estimation. Super-resolution algorithms which use embedded pilot information, such as ESPRIT and MUSIC have been used to estimate this information in the case of sparse multi-path channels. In this paper, we propose a new efficient algorithm based on the matrix pencil method which uses averaged covariance matrices and requires just a single eigen value finding routine to yield the TOA values.