Estimation of Compressible Channel Impulse Response for OFDM Modulated Transmissions

Channel estimation scheme for OFDM modulated transmissions usually combines an initial block-pilot-assisted stage with a tracking one based on comb or scattered pilots distributed among user data in the signal frame. The channel reconstruction accuracy in the former stage has a significant impact on tracking efficiency of the channel variations and the overall transmission quality. The paper presents a new block-pilot-assisted channel reconstruction procedure based on the DFT-based approach and the Least Square impulse response estimation. The proposed method takes into account a compressibility feature of the channel impulse response and restores its coefficients in groups of automatically controlled size. The proposition is analytically explained and tested in a OFDM simulation environment. The popular DFT-based methods including compressed sensing oriented one were used as references for comparison purposes. The obtained results show a quality improvement in terms of Bit Error Rate and Mean Square Error measures in low and mid ranges of signal-to-noise ratio without significant computational complexity growth in comparison to the classical DFT-based solutions. Moreover, additional multiplication operations can be eliminated, compared to the competitive, in terms of estimation quality, compressed sensing reconstruction method based on greedy approach.