IEEE 802.11p standard is specially developed to define vehicular communications requirements and support cooperative intelligent transport systems. In such environment, reliable channel estimation is considered as a major critical challenge for ensuring the system performance due to the extremely time-varying characteristic of vehicular channels. The channel estimation of IEEE 802.11p is preamble based, which becomes inaccurate in high mobility scenarios. The major challenge is to track the channel variations over the course of packet length while adhering to the standard specifications. The motivation behind this paper is to overcome this issue by proposing a novel deep learning based channel estimation scheme for IEEE 802.11p that optimizes the use of deep neural networks (DNN) to accurately learn the statistics of the spectral temporal averaging (STA) channel estimates and to track their changes over time. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed channel estimation scheme STA-DNN significantly outperforms classical channel estimators in terms of bit error rate. The proposed STA-DNN architectures also achieve better estimation performance than the recently proposed auto-encoder DNN based channel estimation with at least 55.74% of computational complexity decrease.

Wireless communications systems are impacted by multi-path fading and Doppler shift in dynamic environments, where the channel becomes doubly-dispersive and its estimation becomes an arduous task. Only a few pilots are used for channel estimation in conventional approaches to preserve high data rate transmission. Consequently, such estimators experience a significant performance degradation in high mobility scenarios. Recently, deep learning has been employed for doubly-dispersive channel estimation due to its low-complexity, robustness, and good generalization ability. Against this backdrop, the current paper presents a comprehensive survey on channel estimation techniques based on deep learning by deeply investigating different methods. The study also provides extensive experimental simulations followed by a computational complexity analysis. After considering different parameters such as modulation order, mobility, frame length, and deep learning architecture, the performance of the studied estimators is evaluated in several mobility scenarios. In addition, the source codes are made available online in order to make the results reproducible.

IEEE 802.11p standard defines wireless technology protocols that enable vehicular transportation and manage traffic efficiency. A major challenge in the development of this technology is ensuring communication reliability in highly dynamic vehicular environments, where the wireless communication channels are doubly selective, thus making channel estimation and tracking a relevant problem to investigate. In this paper, a novel deep learning (DL)-based weighted interpolation estimator is proposed to accurately estimate vehicular channels especially in high mobility scenarios. The proposed estimator is based on modifying the pilot allocation of the IEEE 802.11p standard so that more transmission data rates are achieved. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that the developed estimator significantly outperforms the recently proposed DL-based frame-by-frame estimators in different vehicular scenarios, while substantially reducing the overall computational complexity.

Least square (LS) channel estimation employed in various communications systems suffers from performance degradation especially in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regions. This is due to the noise enhancement in the LS estimation process. Minimum mean square error (MMSE) takes into consideration the noise effect and achieves better performance than LS with higher complexity. This paper proposes to correct the LS estimation error using deep learning (DL). Simulation results show that the proposed DL-based schemes perform better than both LS and MMSE channel estimation scheme, with less complexity than accurate MMSE.

Doubly-selective channel estimation represents a key element in ensuring communication reliability in wireless systems. Due to the impact of multi-path propagation and Doppler interference in dynamic environments, doubly-selective channel estimation becomes challenging. Conventional symbol-by-symbol (SBS) and frame-by-frame (FBF) channel estimation schemes encounter performance degradation in high mobility scenarios due to the usage of limited training pilots. Recently, deep learning (DL) has been utilized for doubly-selective channel estimation, where long short-term memory (LSTM) and convolutional neural network (CNN) networks are employed in the SBS and FBF, respectively. However, their usage is not optimal, since LSTM suffers from long-term memory problem, whereas, CNN-based estimators require high complexity. For this purpose, we overcome these issues by proposing an optimized recurrent neural network (RNN)-based channel estimation schemes, where gated recurrent unit (GRU) and Bi-GRU units are used in SBS and FBF channel estimation, respectively. The proposed estimators are based on the average correlation of the channel in different mobility scenarios, where several performance-complexity trade-offs are provided. Moreover, the performance of several RNN networks is analyzed. The performance superiority of the proposed estimators against the recently proposed DL-based SBS and FBF estimators is demonstrated for different scenarios while recording a significant reduction in the computational complexity and the GPU execution time.

Research into 6G networks has been initiated to support a variety of critical artificial intelligence (AI) assisted applications such as autonomous driving. In such applications, AI-based decisions should be performed in a real-time manner. These decisions include resource allocation, localization, channel estimation, etc. Considering the black-box nature of existing AI-based models, it is highly challenging to understand and trust the decision-making behavior of such models. Therefore, explaining the logic behind those models through explainable AI (XAI) techniques is essential for their employment in critical applications. This manuscript proposes a novel XAI-based channel estimation (XAI-CHEST) scheme that provides detailed reasonable interpretability of the deep learning (DL) models that are employed in doubly-selective channel estimation. The aim of the proposed XAI-CHEST scheme is to identify the relevant model inputs by inducing high noise on the irrelevant ones. As a result, the behavior of the studied DL-based channel estimators can be further analyzed and evaluated based on the generated interpretations. Simulation results show that the proposed XAI-CHEST scheme provides valid interpretations of the DL-based channel estimators for different scenarios.