Approximate MAP Nakagami m Parameter Estimator for Indoor Ultra-Wide Bandwidth Channels

A maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimator for the Nakagami m parameter in an ultra-wide bandwidth (UWB) indoor channel is proposed. Previous work exclusively studies maximum likelihood (ML) estimation and moment method (MM) estimation of the Nakagami m parameter. This paper derives the MAP estimator for the Nakagami m parameter by using the a priori probabilities of the Nakgami fading parameters in an indoor UWB channel. The performance of the MAP estimator is examined and compared with those of the ML estimator and the MM estimator. Numerical results demonstrate that the new MAP estimator is superior to the ML estimator and the MM estimator in an indoor UWB channel, especially when the sample size in the estimation is small.