Compressive Sampling of Multiple Sparse Signals Having Common Support Using Finite Rate of Innovation Principles

In sensor networks and communication systems, one is often confronted with sampling multiple sparse signals having a common support set. Multipath channels in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication setting is an interesting example where one generally needs to perform channel estimation for each transmit-receive antenna pair. MIMO multipath channels are usually (approximately) sparse and satisfy the common-support property whenever the distances between the antennas are small compared to the distance the electromagnetic wave can travel in the time corresponding to the inverse bandwidth of the communication system. This assumption is satisfied by small and medium bandwidth communication systems like OFDM and CDMA. This leads us to extend the finite rate of innovation sampling and reconstruction scheme to the sparse common-support scenario (SCS-FRI), in which input signals contain Diracs with common locations but arbitrary weights. The goal is to efficiently reconstruct the input signals from a set of uniform samples, making use of the common-support property to improve robustness. We first find the best theoretical performance for the SCS-FRI setup by deriving the Cram´er-Rao lower bound. Our results show that for a set of well-separated Diracs, it is the total energy of the Diracs at each common position which determines the bound. We then propose a multi-channel reconstruction algorithm and compare its performance with the Cram´er-Rao lower bound. Numerical results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed sampling and reconstruction scheme in low SNR regimes.