Rician K-Factor Estimation Using Deep Learning

Wireless communications systems design and its performance depend on the wireless fading channels, which are often characterized using a Rician probability function. A Rician K-factor is used to describe the fading severity in a Rician fading channel and is used in the system design and performance evaluation. Therefore, the estimation of the Rician K-factor is important in wireless communications research and development. Traditionally, a Rician K-factor equation, the statistics of the instantaneous frequency of the received signal with a lookup table, or the James-Stein estimator with the maximum likelihood estimation is used for the K-factor estimation. In this paper, we explore the use of deep learning for K-factor estimation. Specifically, we use the convolutional neural network (CNN) to estimate the Rician K-factor from a waveform signal in a Rician channel. Numerical results demonstrate its good performance in estimating the K-factor of the Rician channel.