  In this work we design a receiver that iteratively passes soft information
between the channel estimation and data decoding stages. The receiver
incorporates sparsity-based parametric channel estimation. State-of-the-art
sparsity-based iterative receivers simplify the channel estimation problem by
restricting the multipath delays to a grid. Our receiver does not impose such a
restriction. As a result it does not suffer from the leakage effect, which
destroys sparsity. Communication at near capacity rates in high SNR requires a
large modulation order. Due to the close proximity of modulation symbols in
such systems, the grid-based approximation is of insufficient accuracy. We show
numerically that a state-of-the-art iterative receiver with grid-based sparse
channel estimation exhibits a bit-error-rate floor in the high SNR regime. On
the contrary, our receiver performs very close to the perfect channel state
information bound for all SNR values. We also demonstrate both theoretically
and numerically that parametric channel estimation works well in dense
channels, i.e., when the number of multipath components is large and each
individual component cannot be resolved.
