Abstract

Wireless vehicular communications are a promising technology. Most applications related to vehicular communications aim to improve road safety and have special requirements concerning latency and reliability. The traditional channel estimation techniques used in the IEEE 802.11 standard do not properly perform over vehicular channels. This is because vehicular communications are subject to non-stationary, time-varying, frequency-selective wireless channels. Therefore, the main goal of this work is the introduction of a new channel estimation and equalization technique based on a Semi-supervised Extreme Learning Machine (SS-ELM) in order to address the harsh characteristics of the vehicular channel and improve the performance of the communication link. The performance of the proposed technique is compared with traditional estimators, as well as state-of-the-art machine-learning-based algorithms over an urban scenario setup in terms of bit error rate. The proposed SS-ELM scheme outperformed the extreme learning machine and the fully complex extreme learning machine algorithms for the evaluated scenarios. Compared to traditional techniques, the proposed SS-ELM scheme has a very similar performance. It is also observed that, although the SS-ELM scheme requires the largest operation time among the evaluated techniques, its execution time is still far away from the latency requirements specified by the standard for safety applications.