UC Riverside

This paper develops a fast maximum likelihood method for estimating the impulse responses ofmultiple FIR channels driven by an arbitrary unknown input. The resulting method consists of two iterative steps, where each step minimizes a quadratic function. The two-step maximum likelihood(TSML) method is shown to be high-SNR efficient, i.e., attaining the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRB) at high SNR. The TSML method exploits a novel orthogonal complement matrix of the generalized Sylvester matrix. Simulations show that the TSML, method significantly outperforms the cross-relation (CR) method and the subspace (SS) method and attains the CRB over a wide range of SNR. This paper also studies a Fisher information (FI) matrix to reveal the identifiability of the M-channel system. A strong connection between the FI-based identifiability and the CR-based identifiability is established