Detecting Specular Propagation Paths in the Presence of Distributed Scattering in Angle and Delay Domains

In this paper, we derive a method for the detection and estimation of specular propagation paths that takes the correlation in both, angle and delay domain, of the distributed scattering into account. The method is based on an iterative procedure that alternates between the estimation of specular paths and of distributed scattering. The computational complexity is reduced compared to deterministic methods, which are based on the estimation of parameters of a large number of specular paths. The results show that the proposed method is able to detect and estimate the propagation parameters of specular paths that have low power, which would not be distinguished from distributed scattering by existing techniques.