Blind Algorithm for Channel Length Estimation Using Cumulant Features

Cognitive radios employed in emergency or military applications are subjected to harsh time varying channel conditions. In emergency application, since there is no information available about the wireless medium, blind equalizers are employed. One of the challenges in designing of blind equalizer is to choose the length of the equalizer. The length of the equalizer depends on the length of the channel which is generally not known. In this paper we propose a novel method to estimate the length of the channel using cumulant features. The validity of the proposed method is verified using computer simulation.