Estimation of mobile speed and average received power in wireless systems using best basis methods

A new method is presented for estimating the mobile speed and the average received power in general wireless propagation environments. The locally stationary received signal is expanded in a local exponential basis using best basis methods of wavelet analysis. An estimate of the time-varying Doppler power spectrum is obtained together with an estimate of the maximum Doppler frequency, which is proportional to the mobile speed. The average received power is then estimated by integrating the time-varying spectrum. Simulations demonstrate good tracking of variable mobile speed and average received power for a wide range of angular distributions of incident power. The estimator is shown to perform significantly better than an adaptive averaging method described in the literature. The speed and average power estimates are also used to detect the corner effect in urban cellular systems to improve handoff performance and reduce the call dropping rate.