  Time delay estimation arises in many applications in which a multipath medium
has to be identified from pulses transmitted through the channel. Various
approaches have been proposed in the literature to identify time delays
introduced by multipath environments. However, these methods either operate on
the analog received signal, or require high sampling rates in order to achieve
reasonable time resolution. In this paper, our goal is to develop a unified
approach to time delay estimation from low rate samples of the output of a
multipath channel. Our methods result in perfect recovery of the multipath
delays from samples of the channel output at the lowest possible rate, even in
the presence of overlapping transmitted pulses. This rate depends only on the
number of multipath components and the transmission rate, but not on the
bandwidth of the probing signal. In addition, our development allows for a
variety of different sampling methods. By properly manipulating the low-rate
samples, we show that the time delays can be recovered using the well-known
ESPRIT algorithm. Combining results from sampling theory with those obtained in
the context of direction of arrival estimation methods, we develop necessary
and sufficient conditions on the transmitted pulse and the sampling functions
in order to ensure perfect recovery of the channel parameters at the minimal
possible rate. Our results can be viewed in a broader context, as a sampling
theorem for analog signals defined over an infinite union of subspaces.
