Joint TRFI and Deep Learning for Vehicular Channel Estimation

IEEE 802.11p standard enables the wireless technology that defines vehicular communications. However, IEEE 802.11p frame structure employing low pilot density is not enough to track the channel variations in high mobility scenarios, leading to significant performance degradation. Therefore, ensuring communication reliability in vehicular environments is considered as a major challenge. In this work, this challenge is tackled by employing deep learning into conventional channel estimation through utilizing deep neural networks (DNN) as an additional non-linear processing unit to correct the interpolation error of the time domain reliable test frequency domain interpolation (TRFI) channel estimates, besides learning higher order statistics of the estimated channel, resulting in a better channel tracking over time. Simulation results demonstrate the performance superiority of the proposed TRFI-DNN scheme over conventional schemes and the recently proposed DNN estimators with a significant computational complexity decrease, especially in high mobility vehicular scenarios.