Time-Domain Channel Estimation Scheme for OFDM over Fast Fading Channels

In high-mobility scenarios, the time variation of mobile radio channels leads to a loss of orthogonality among subcarriers in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, resulting in intercarrier interference (ICI) and performance deterioration. Conventional channel estimation schemes are usually based on pilot tones, which are distributed in each OFDM symbol to estimate the channel variation. Hence, the channel estimator itself suffers from ICI. In this study, a new estimation scheme, which does not suffer from ICI, is proposed to estimate the channel variation within OFDM symbols. The main idea is to zero-pad (ZP) the OFDM symbol in the time domain. Then, in the middle of the ZP interval, an impulse signal is inserted as a pilot sample, which is used to estimate the channel at the pilot signal in the OFDM symbol. Finally, a linear model is used to estimate the channel variation over an OFDM symbol. Additionally, we derive the mean squared error (MSE) of the proposed estimation technique under the constraint that the channel varies linearly within OFDM symbols. Simulation results show that our scheme can achieve a substantial improvement in the bit error rate (BER) performance of OFDM, in spite of the OFDM symbol length being increased. Moreover, in many cases, the new scheme can achieve the same BER performance as the perfect knowledge of channel state information (CSI). Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations show that our scheme achieves excellent performance with much lower computational complexity.