Tracking of time-variant radio propagation paths using particle filtering

In this contribution a low-complexity particle filtering algorithm is proposed to track the parameters of time-variant propagation paths in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radio channels. A state-space model is used to describe the path evolution in delay, azimuth of arrival, azimuth of departure, Doppler frequency and complex amplitude dimensions. The proposed particle filter (PF) has an additional resampling step specifically designed for wideband MIMO channel sounding, where the posterior probability density functions of the path states is usually highly concentrated in the multi-dimensional state space. Preliminary investigations using measurement data show that the proposed PF can track paths stably with a small number of particles, e.g. 5 per path, even in the case where the paths are undetected by the conventional SAGE algorithm.