A Polynomial Inversion-Based Fast Time-Delay Estimation Method for Wideband Large-Scale Antenna Systems

This paper proposes a new fast time-delay estimation (TDE) method based on polynomial inversion which addresses the challenges arising from the requirements for high-precision, low-computational-complexity synchronization error estimation in wideband large-scale antenna systems (LSASs). In this work, we use the convex parabolic extreme point equation as the timing error detector (TED), and develop a polynomial inversion-based function to characterize the one-to-one mapping relationship between true time delay (TTD) and TED estimates using the least square (LS) method, then obtain the time-delay difference with a high accuracy and high computational efficiency. The results of the performance analysis indicate that the Mean Square Error (MSE) of the proposed algorithm is less than 1 dB away from the Cramer–Rao lower bound (CRLB), which is produced in this paper, while adding a few multipliers compared to the convex parabolic interpolation method. Finally, a further example illustrates that the proposed algorithm can achieve a synchronization error of less than 5 ps between channels based on the NI PXI broadband multichannel acquisition platform.