On the estimation of the degrees of freedom of indoor UWB channel

In this paper, we apply Akaike information criterion (AIC) and minimum description length (MDL) to estimate the number of degrees of freedom (DoF) of an ultra-wide band channel (UWB) in an indoor environment. We evaluate our solution under both scenarios, line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS). Based on AIC and the MDL criterion, we find that this number is large; this has important consequences on the receiver design. We show also, that in opposition to the accepted idea in the literature, the number of DoF does not increase linearly with the channel bandwidth.