Exploiting Spectral Regrowth for Channel Identification

In modern communication systems, power amplifiers (PAs) are important components and inherently nonlinear. The nonlinearity of the PA causes bandwidth expansion of the communication signal, often referred to as spectral regrowth, at the PA output. Conventionally, spectral regrowth is treated as a distortion, and a range of compensation and filtering techniques have been considered to mitigate its effect. In this paper, we propose to exploit spectral regrowth to enhance channel identification accuracy. Our approach is motivated by the fact that the nonlinearly amplified communication signal carries more bandwidth and allows better probing of the channel. We introduce an iterative algorithm which jointly estimates the PA characteristics and the channel impulse response. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is illustrated by computer simulation.