2ND QUARTER 2007, VOLUME 9, NO.

www.comsoc.org/pubs/surveys

CHANNEL ESTIMATION FOR WIRELESS OFDM SYSTEMS

MEHMET KEMAL OZDEMIR, LOGUS BROADBAND WIRELESS SOLUTIONS, INC. AND HUSEYIN ARSLAN, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA ABSTRACT
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a special case of multi-carrier transmission and it can accommodate high data rate requirement of multimedia based wireless systems. Since channel estimation is an integral part of OFDM systems, it is critical to understand the basis of channel estimation techniques for OFDM systems so that the most appropriate method can be applied. In this article, an extensive overview of channel estimation techniques employed in OFDM systems are presented. In addition, the advantages, drawbacks, and relationship of these estimation techniques with each other are analyzed and discussed. As the combination of multiple input multiple output (MIMO)-OFDM systems promises higher data rates, estimation techniques are further investigated for these systems. Although the existing proposed techniques differ in terms of computational complexity and their mean squared error (MSE) performance, it has been observed that many channel estimation techniques are indeed a subset of LMMSE channel estimation technique. Hence, based on a given systems resources and specifications, a suitable method among the presented techniques can be applied.

riven by multimedia based applications, anticipated future wireless systems will require high data rate capable technologies. Novel techniques such as OFDM and MIMO stand as promising choices for future high data rate systems [1, 2]. OFDM divides the available spectrum into a number of overlapping but orthogonal narrowband subchannels, and hence converts a frequency selective channel into a nonfrequency selective channel [3]. Moreover, ISI is avoided by the use of CP, which is achieved by extending an OFDM symbol with some portion of its head or tail [4]. With these vital advantages, OFDM has been adopted by many wireless standards such as DAB, DVB, WLAN, and WMAN [5, 6]. MIMO, on the other hand, employs multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver sides to open up additional subchannels in spatial domain. Since parallel channels are established over the same time and frequency, high data rates without the need of extra bandwidth are achieved [7, 8]. Due to this bandwidth efficiency, MIMO is included in the standards of future BWA [9]. Overall, these benefits have made the combination of MIMO-OFDM an attractive technique for future high data rate systems [1012].

As in many other coherent digital wireless receivers, channel estimation is also an integral part of the receiver designs in coherent MIMO-OFDM systems [13]. In wireless systems, transmitted information reaches to receivers after passing through a radio channel. For conventional coherent receivers, the effect of the channel on the transmitted signal must be estimated to recover the transmitted information [14]. As long as the receiver accurately estimates how the channel modifies the transmitted signal, it can recover the transmitted information. Channel estimation can be avoided by using differential modulation techniques, however, such systems result in low data rate and there is a penalty for 34 dB SNR [15 19]. In some cases, channel estimation at user side can be avoided if the base station performs the channel estimation and sends a pre-distorted signal [20]. However, for fast varying channels, the pre-distorted signal might not bear the current channel distortion, causing system degradation. Hence, systems with a channel estimation block are needed for the future high data rate systems. Channel estimation is a challenging problem in wireless systems. Unlike other guided media, the radio channel is highly dynamic. The transmitted signal travels to the receiver by undergoing many detrimental effects that corrupt the signal

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IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2nd Quarter 2007

CIR Coefficients Coefficients

CFR

DFT/IDFT

Tap index

Subcarrier index

n Figure 1. Time and frequency domain channels representation for OFDM based systems.
and often place limitations on the performance of the system. Transmitted signals are typically reflected and scattered, arriving at receivers along multiple paths. Also, due to the mobility of transmitters, receivers, or scattering objects, the channel response can change rapidly over time. Most important of all, the radio channel is highly random and the statistical characteristics of the channel are environment dependent. Multipath propagation, mobility, and local scattering cause the signal to be spread in frequency, time, and angle. These spreads, which are related to the selectivity of the channel, have significant implications on the received signal. Channel estimation performance is directly related to these statistics. Different techniques are proposed to exploit these statistics for better channel estimates. There has been some studies that cover these estimation techniques, however these are limited to the comparison of few of the channel estimation techniques [2124]. This paper focuses on an extensive overview of the channel estimation techniques commonly applied to OFDM based multi-carrier wireless systems. mation. In this article, only the non-blind channel estimation techniques will be investigated. The non-blind channel estimation can be studied under two main groups: data aided and DDCE. In data aided channel estimation, a complete OFDM symbol or a portion of a symbol, which is known by the receiver, is transmitted so that the receiver can easily estimate the radio channel by demodulating the received samples. Often, frequency domain pilots are employed similar to those in new generation WLAN standards (802.11a and HYPERLAN2) [27]. The estimation accuracy can be improved by increasing the pilot density. However, this introduces overhead and reduces the spectral efficiency. In the limiting case, when pilot tones are assigned to all subcarriers of a particular OFDM symbol, an OFDM training symbol can be obtained (block type pilot arrangement). This type of pilot arrangement is usually considered for slow channel variation and for burst type data transmission schemes, where the channel is assumed to be constant over the burst. The training symbols are then inserted at the beginning of the bursts to estimate the CFR (e.g. WLAN and WiMAX systems) [28, 29]. When channel varies between consecutive OFDM symbols, either the training symbols should be inserted regularly within OFDM data symbols with respect to the time variation of the channel (Doppler spread), or the channel should be tracked in a decision directed mode to enhance the receiver performance. In the DDCE methods, to decode the current OFDM symbol the channel estimates for a previous OFDM symbol are used. The channel corresponding to the current symbol is then estimated by using the newly estimated symbol information. Since an outdated channel is used in the decoding process, these estimates are less reliable as the channel can vary drastically from symbol to symbol [31, 32]. Hence, additional information is usually incorporated in DDCE such as periodically sent training symbols. Channel coding, interleaving, and iterative type approaches are also commonly applied to boost the performance of DDCE~techniques. There are numerous approaches to estimate the channels for OFDM subcarriers. The direct estimation of the channel for subcarriers treats each subcarrier as if the channels are independent. However, in practice, the CFR is often oversampled via the subcarriers, and hence the estimated frequency domain channel coefficients are correlated. On the other hand, the noise in these subcarriers can be independent. By utilizing the correlation of CFR in subcarriers, the noise can be reduced significantly. Therefore, the channel estimation accuracy can be improved [28]. Several approaches have been proposed to exploit this correlation. These approaches and their relationship with each other will be discussed in the subsequent sections to provide a unified understanding. Similarly, the subcarrier correlation in time and spatial domain can be exploited since the noise can be considered to be independent in time and spatial domain as well.

OFDM CHANNEL ESTIMATION

Channel estimation has a long and rich history in single carrier communication systems. In these systems, the CIR is typically modeled as an unknown time-varying FIR filter, whose coefficients need to be estimated [14]. Many of the channel estimation approaches of single carrier systems can be applied to multi-carrier systems. However, the unique properties of multi-carrier transmission bring about additional perspectives that allow the development of new approaches for channel estimation of multi-carrier systems. In OFDM based systems, the data is modulated onto the orthogonal frequency carriers. For coherent detection of the transmitted data, these sub-channel frequency responses must be estimated and removed from the frequency samples. Like in single carrier systems, the time domain channel can be modelled as a FIR filter, where the delays and coefficients can be estimated from time domain received samples, which are then transformed to frequency domain for obtaining the CFR. Alternatively, radio channel can also be estimated in frequency domain using the known (or detected) data on frequency domain sub-channels. Instead of estimating FIR coefficients, one tap CFR can be estimated (Fig. 1). Channel estimation techniques for OFDM based systems can be grouped into two main categories: blind and non-blind. The blind channel estimation methods exploit the statistical behavior of the received signals and require a large amount of data [25]. Hence, they suffer severe performance degradation in fast fading channels [26]. On the other hand, in the nonblind channel estimation methods, information of previous channel estimates or some portion of the transmitted signal are available to the receiver to be used for the channel esti-

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Cyclic prefix X1 S / P IFFT Kpoint P / S S / P

Remove Cyclic prefix Y1 IFFT Kpoint P / S K

Ant #1 Wireless channel

Ant #1

K Coding, modulation, interleaving K S / P Cyclic prefix IFFT Kpoint P / S

Data bits

Deinterleaving, demodulation, decoding Remove Cyclic prefix S / P IFFT Kpoint P / S K CSI YNrx

Output bits

Ant #Ntx

Ant #Nrx

XNtx

n Figure 2. MIMO-OFDM transceiver model.

Although it is a common approach to assume the channel to be constant over an OFDM symbol duration [9, 27], for fast fading channels the same assumption leads to ICI [33], which degrades the channel estimation performance. Hence, the methods employed in data-aided and decision directed channel estimation need to be modified so that the variation of the channel over the OFDM symbol is taken into account for better estimates. External interfering sources also affect the performance of channel estimation. The effect of interfering sources can be mitigated by exploiting their statistical properties. Although most systems treat ICI and external interference as part of noise, better channel estimation performance can be obtained by more accurate modeling [34]. There are basically three basic blocks affecting the performance of the non-blind channel estimation techniques. These are the pilot patterns, the estimation method, and the signal detection part. Each method covered in this article either tackles one of the above basic block or several at a time. The specific choice depends on the wireless system specifications and the channel condition. The aspects of each method are presented such that a suitable method can easily be selected for a given wireless system and channel conditions. It can be observed that each method can be approximated to the other methods by using the same set of variables. For example, in this paper it is shown that each estimation method is indeed a subset of LMMSE technique. In the literature, initial channel estimation methods have been mostly developed for SISO-OFDM systems, that is, single antenna systems. With the emergence of MIMO-OFDM, these methods need some modifications as the received signal in MIMO-OFDM is the superposition of all the transmitted signals of a given user. In many cases, the methods of SISOOFDM are easily adopted for MIMO-OFDM but novel methods exploiting space-time codes or other MIMO specific elements are also introduced. In the rest of the article, starting from a generic system model, the channel estimation techniques will be presented starting from the less complicated techniques. More emphasis will be given on data aided channel estimation as it provides some unique approaches for OFDM systems. Discussions on ICI, external interferers, and MIMO systems as well as related issues will also be given. Finally, some concluding remarks and potential research areas will be given at the end of the article. domain variables; (.) H denotes conjugate-transpose; E{.} denotes expected value; diag(x) stands for diagonal matrix with the column vector x on its diagonal; 0 ab denotes a matrix of a b zero entries; IN denotes N N identity with matrix; and j= 1.

SYSTEM MODEL
A generic block diagram of a basic baseband-equivalent MIMO-OFDM system is given in Fig. 2. A MIMO-OFDM system with Ntx transmit and Nrx receive antennas is assumed. The information bits can be coded and interleaved. The coded bits are then mapped into data symbols depending on the modulation type. Another stage of interleaving and coding can be performed for the modulated symbols. Although the symbols are in time domain, the data up to this point is considered to be in the frequency domain. The data is then demultiplexed for different transmitter antennas. The serial data symbols are then converted to parallel blocks, and an IFFT is applied to these parallel blocks to obtain the time domain OFDM symbols. For the transmit antenna, tx, time domain samples of an OFDM symbol can be obtained from frequency domain symbols as (1) [ n, m ] = xtx

IFFT { Xtx [ n, k ]}
K 1

(1) (2)

= Xtx [ n, k ]e j 2 mk / K 0 k, m K 1
k =0

where X tx [n, k] is the data at the kth subcarrier of the nth OFDM symbol, K is the number of subcarriers, and m is the time domain sampling index. After the addition of CP, which is larger than the expected maximum excess delay of the channel, and D/A conversion, the signals from different transmit antennas are sent through the radio channel. The channel between each transmitter/receiver link is modelled as a multi-tap channel with the same statistics [3]. The typical channel at time t is expressed as,
L 1

NOTATION
Matrices and the vectors are denoted with boldface letters, where the upper/lower letters will be used for frequency/time

h(t , ) = l (t ) ( l ),
l =0

(3)

where L is the number of taps, l is the lth complex path gain, and l is the corresponding path delay. The path gains are WSS complex Gaussian processes. The individual paths can be

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correlated, and the channel can be sparse. At time t, the CFR of the CIR is given by,

variables in matrix notation, for rxth receive antenna and nth OFDM symbol, we get
N tx

H (t , f ) =

h(t , )e j 2 f d .

(4)

Yrx =

Frxtx F H Xtx + Irx + Wrx , Xtx + Irx + Wrx .

(11)

tx =1 N tx

With proper CP and timing, the CFR can be written as [3],

L 1

=
kl K

H [ n, k ] H (nT f , k f ) = h[ n, l ]F ,
l =0

(5)

tx =1

(12)

where h[n, l] = h(nT f , kt s ), F K = e j2/K , T f is the symbol length including CP, f is the subcarrier spacing, and ts = 1/Df is the sample interval. In matrix notations, for the nth OFDM symbol, Eq. 5 can be rewritten as H = Fh (6) where H is the column vector containing the channel at each subcarrier, F is the unitary FFT matrix, and h is the column vector containing the CIR taps. At the receiver, the signal from different transmit antennas are received along with noise and interference. After perfect synchronization, down sampling, and the removal of the CP, the simplified received baseband model of the samples for a given receive antenna, rx, can be formulated as
N tx L 1 m yrx [ n, m ] = xtx [ n, m l ]hrxtx [ n, l ] tx =1 l = 0

Here, Yrx is column vector storing the received signal at each subcarrier, F is the unitary FFT matrix with entries ej2mk/KK with m and k being the row and column index and = F rxtx F H , which can be considered as the equivalent channel between each received and all the transmitted subcarriers. Moreover Xtx denotes the column vector for transmitted symbols from txth transmit antenna, Irx is the column vector for interferers, Wrx is the column vector for noise, and rxtx is the matrix containing the channel taps at each m index. The entries of are given by h 0 [ n, 0 ] 0 rxtx 1 1 hrxtx [ n,1] hrxtx [ n, 0 ] = L 1 L 1 hrxtx [ n, L 1] hrxtx [ n, L 2 ] 0 0
0 hrxtx [ n, 2 ] 0 hrxtx [ n,1] 1 hrxtx [ n, 2 ] 1 hrxtx [ n, 3]

rxtx

(7)
m h rxtx[n,

+ irx [ n, m ] + wrx [ n, m ],
where rx =1, , Nrx, the time domain effective CIR, l], over an OFDM symbol is given as time-variant linear filter depending on the time selectivity of the channel. Please note that n represents OFDM symbol number, while m denotes the m sampling index in time domain so that h rxtx[n, l] is the CIR at the sampling time index m for the symbol n. When the CIR is m constant over an OFDM symbol duration, then h rxtx[n, l] will be the same for all m values, and hence the superscript m can be dropped. Moreover, i rx [n, m] is the term representing external interference, w rx [n, m] is the AWGN sample with 2 zero mean and variance of w. After taking FFT of the time domain samples of Eq. 7, the received samples in frequency domain can be expressed as,

0 0 0 0

(13)

K K hrxtx1[ n, L 1] hrxtx1[ n, 0 ]

Yrx [ n, k ] =

1 K

K 1

yrx [n, m]e

m=0 K 1 N tx L 1

2 km K

(8)

1 m = xtx [ n, m l ]hrxtx [ n, l ] K m =0 tx =1 l =0 + irx [ n, m ] + wrx [ n, m ]] e = 1 tx =1 K

m rxtx N tx K 1 L 1 K 1 j 2 km K

(9)

x
m = 0 l = 0 k = 0 j 2 km K

[ n, k ] e j 2 ( m l ) k / K tx

(10)

h [ n, l ] e

+ I rx [ n, k ] + Wrx [ n, k ]

where Irx[n, k] and Wrx[n, k] are the corresponding frequency domain components calculated from irx[n, m]s and wrx[n, m]s, respectively. After arranging the terms, and representing the

When the channel is assumed to be constant over one OFDM symbol and the CP is larger than the CIR length, then h m [n, l] is the same for all ms, making rxtx a circulant rxtx matrix [35]. The multiplication of FrxtxF H then results in a diagonal matrix, and hence no cross-terms between subcarriers exist, that is, no ICI occurs. In this case, h is equivalent to the first column of . However, when the channel varies over an OFDM symbol, then ICI occurs, and for the equalization the channel at each time sample of OFDM symbol is needed, that is, at each m samples. For the frequency domain estimation, this requirement translates into the knowledge of the channel coefficients at each carrier frequency as well as their cross-terms. The number of unknowns in time domain estimation are KL, whereas the number of unknowns in frequency domain (the entries of ) are K2. In either case, the number of unknowns will be higher than the number of equations, and hence a system of under-determined equations will result in. Simplifications are needed so that the unknowns in the system of equations are reduced. Different approaches will be described in detail in the subsequent sections. Once the received signals for each transmit antennas are detected with the help of channel estimation, the reverse operation at the receiver is performed, that is, they are demodulated, de-interleaved, and decoded. As it will be seen later, the information at different stages of decoding process can be exploited to enhance the performance of channel estimation methods.

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Frequency

Time Training symbols (a) Data symbols Pilot subcarriers

Frequency

Time Data subcarriers (b)

n Figure 3. Typical training symbols and pilot subcarriers arrangement.

OFDM CHANNEL ESTIMATION TECHNIQUES
There are several basic techniques to estimate the radio channel in OFDM systems. The estimation techniques can be performed using time or frequency domain samples. These estimators differ in terms of their complexity, performance, practicality in applications to a given standard, and the a priori information they use. The a priori information can be subcarriers correlation in frequency [36], time [3], and spatial domains [37]. Moreover, the transmitted signals being constant modulus [38], CIR length [39], and using a known alphabet for the modulation can also be a priori information [40, 41]. The more the a priori information is exploited, in general the better the estimates are [42]. For frequency domain channel estimates, MSE is usually considered as the performance measure of channel estimates, and it is defined by MSE = E{|H[n, k] H [n, k]|2},
^ ^

H[n, k] = [k, k].

(15)

Furthermore, the external interference is folded into the noise with noise statistics being unchanged. With the above assumption, the expression in (12) can be expressed as Y = diag(X) H + W, or Y[n, k] = H[n, k] X[n, k] + W[n, k]. (17) Here H and W are the column vectors representing the channel and the noise at each subcarrier for the nth OFDM symbol, respectively. In data aided channel estimation, known information to the receiver is inserted in OFDM symbols so that the current channel can be estimated. Two techniques are commonly used: sending known information over one or more OFDM symbols with no data being sent, or sending known information together with the data. The previous arrangement is usually called channel estimation with training symbols while the latter is called pilots aided channel estimation (Fig. 3). Channel estimation employing training symbols periodically sends training symbols so that the channel estimates are updated [29]. In some cases training symbols can be sent once, and the channel estimation can then be followed by decision directed type channel estimation. The details of the decision directed will be given later in the article. In the pilots aided channel estimation, the pilots are multiplexed with the data. For time domain estimation, the CIR is estimated first. The estimate of the CIR are then passed through a FFT operation to get the channel at each subcarrier for the equalization in frequency domain. For frequency domain estimation, the channel at each pilot is estimated, and then these estimates are interpolated via different methods. Pilots Allocation for Data Aided Channel Estimation For the pilot aided channel estimation, the pilot spacing needs to be determined carefully. The spacing of pilot tones in frequency domain depends on the coherence frequency (channel frequency variation) of the radio channel, which is related to the delay spread. According to the Nyquist sampling theorem, (16)

(14)

where H [n, k] is the estimate of equivalent channel at kth subcarrier of nth OFDM symbol. Although MSE is used extensively, sometimes, other measures like BER performance are also used [43, 44]. BER performance is mainly used when the performance of OFDM system with the channel estimation error is to be evaluated [45, 46]. Before introducing the estimation techniques, it is worthwhile to look at the data aided channel estimation in general and the pilot allocation mechanisms.

DATA AIDED CHANNEL ESTIMATION

In this subsection, we will review commonly used methods in the data aided channel estimation. Initially, we will consider the methods developed for SISO-OFDM. ICI is assumed not to exist and the CIR is assumed to be constant for at least one OFDM symbol. Hence, is a diagonal matrix, where each diagonal element represents the channel between the corresponding received and the transmitted subcarriers. In this case, for the nth OFDM symbol, the channel given in Eq. 5 at each subcarrier can be related to as

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0.9

0.8 Correlation coefficient (abs)

0.7

0.6

0.5

0.4 0.3 0 10 20 30 40 Subcarrier index 50 60 70

n Figure 4. Periodic behavior of subcarriers cross-correlation for

K = 64. the number of subcarrier spacing between the pilots in frequency domain, Dp, must be small enough so that the variations of the channel in frequency can be all captured, that is, 1 Dp (18) max df where max is the maximum excess delay of channel. When the above is not satisfied, then the channel available at the pilot tones does not sample the actual channel accurately. In this case, an irreducible error floor in the estimation technique exists since this causes aliasing of the CIR taps in the time domain [47]. When the channel is varying across OFDM symbols, in order to be able to track the variation of channel in time domain, the pilot tones need to be inserted at some ratio that is a function of coherence time (time variation of channel), which is related to Doppler spread. The maximum spacing of pilot tones across time is given by 1 Dt (19) 2 fdmaxTf where f d max is the maximum Doppler spread and T f is the OFDM symbol duration. For comb-type pilot arrangements, the pilot tones are often inserted for every OFDM symbols. When the spacing between the pilot tones does not satisfy the Nyquist criteria, then the pilots can still be exploited in a combined pilot-plus DDCE [48]. The pilots can be sent continuously for each OFDM symbol. Since the channel might be varying both in time and frequency domains, for the reconstruction of the channel, this 2-D function needs to be sampled at least a Nyquist rate. Hence, the rate of insertion of pilots in frequency domain and from one OFDM symbol to another cannot be set arbitrarily. The spacing of pilots should be according to Eq. 18 and Eq. 19. In general, within an OFDM symbol the number of pilots in frequency domain should be greater than the CIR length (maximum excess delay), which is related to the channel delay spread. Over the time, the Doppler spread is the main criteria for the pilot placement. Many studies are performed in order to get the optimum pilot locations in time-frequency grid given a minimum number of pilots that sample the channel in 2-D at least Nyquist rate. This optimality is in general based on the MSE of the LS estimates [6, 49]. It should be noted that an optimum pilot allocation is a trade-off between wasted energy in unnecessary pilot symbols, the fading process not being sampled sufficient-

ly, the channel estimation accuracy, and the spectral efficiency of the system [50]. Hence, an optimum pilot allocation for a given channel might not be optimal for another channel as the fading process will be different. In addition to minimizing MSE of the channel estimates, pilots also need to simplify the channel estimation algorithms so that the system resources are not wasted. For example, it is noted that the use of constant modulus pilots simplify the channel estimation algorithms as matrix operations become less complex [38, 51]. Some other important elements for pilot arrangements are the allocation of power to the pilots with respect to the data symbols, the modulation for the pilot tones etc. In many cases, the power for pilot tones and data symbols are equally distributed. The channel estimation accuracy can be improved by transmitting more power at the pilot tones compared to the data symbols [52]. For a given total power, this reduces the SNR over the data transmission. As for the pilot power at different subcarriers, studies show that based on the MSE of the LS estimates pilots should be equipowered [6, 53]. Moreover, due to the lack of the pilot subcarriers at the edge of OFDM symbols, the estimation via the extrapolation for the edge subcarriers results in a higher error [54, 55]. Simulations also reveal that the channel estimation error at the edge subcarriers are higher than those at the mid-bands due to this extrapolation [5658]. One quick solution would be to increase the number of pilot subcarriers at the edge subcarriers [58], however this would decrease the spectral efficiency of the system [57]. Due to the periodic behavior of the Fourier Transform, the subcarriers at the beginning and the end of the OFDM symbol are correlated, and this can be used to improve the channel estimates at the edge subcarriers (Fig. 4). Simulations exploiting this property are reported to enhance the estimation accuracy of the edge subcarriers [57]. Another issue related to pilot arrangement is the pattern of the pilots, that is, how to insert the pilots to efficiently track the channel variation both in time and frequency domains. The selection of a pilot pattern may affect the channel estimation performance, and hence the BER performance of the system. Equation 18 states that the pilot spacing in frequency domain needs to satisfy the Nyquist criteria. More insight into Eq. 18 reveals that the number of required pilots in frequency domain can be taken as the CIR length. At a first glance, this does not pose any restriction on the pilot spacing that a sufficient number of pilots can be inserted in adjacent subcarriers. However, when the MSE of the time domain LS estimation, which is covered in the next subsection, is analyzed, it is observed that the minimum MSE is obtained when the pilots are equispaced with maximum distance [6, 31, 39]. This is due to the reason that when the pilots are inserted in adjacent subcarriers, then the FFT matrix used in the time domain LS estimation approaches to an ill conditioned matrix, making the system performance vulnerable to the noise effect [39]. Hence, from the MSE of LS estimation, the pilots in frequency domain need to be equipowered, equispaced, and their number should not be less than the CIR length. Since the use of pilots is a trade-off between extra overhead and the accuracy of the estimation, adaptive allocation of pilots based on the channel length estimation can offer a better trade-off [52, 56, 59]. As will be seen later in the article, with MIMO and ICI additional requirements will be observed on the pilot subcarriers spacing and properties. When it comes to the pilot allocation for subsequent OFDM symbols, either the set of subcarriers chosen in a previous OFDM symbol or a different set of pilots can be used (Fig. 3). The use of the same subcarriers as the pilots is a

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widely used pilot arrangement. In such a pilot arrangement, first the channel between subcarriers is estimated via interpolation in frequency domain. This is followed by interpolation over OFDM symbols in time domain. In some cases, interpolation can be first performed in time domain, followed by the frequency domain interpolation. The details of different interpolation techniques will be given later in this section. The analysis of MSE of time domain LS estimation over several OFDM symbol indicates that for a lower MSE, the pilots should be cyclically shifted for the next OFDM symbol [6, 60]. This pilot allocation is similar to those used in DTV applications, and is similar to the pilot scheme given in Fig. 13. In this pilot allocation scheme, the interpolation is first performed in frequency domain, followed by the interpolation in time domain. Similar to the pilot scheme used in DTV, a hexagonal type pilot scheme is also proposed [6163]. In both schemes, different subcarriers are utilized for each OFDM symbol, and hence the possibility of sticking into terribly fading subcarriers is eliminated, that is, diversity is exploited. In addition to the above pilot schemes, different types of pilot schemes are tested through simulations [56]. The pilots having more density than the others, those utilizing different subcarriers over time and at the edge subcarriers are expected to perform better for channels varying both in time and frequency domains. The previous pilot allocation schemes were solely based on the MSE analysis of the channel estimation. In some cases, other system parameters can also be considered for the pilots to be used. For example, due to the IFFT block at the transmitter side, PAPR of OFDM systems can be very high. It is observed that different training symbols (not scattered pilots) results in different PAPR [64]. Moreover, different scattered pilot allocation schemes can result in different PAPR when multiplexed with data. Since the data is random, the optimum allocation for minimum PAPR will be different for each transmission. However, pre-defined pilot allocation schemes can be tested for the best PAPR [65]. With such a scheme however, the information about the pilot scheme needs to be conveyed to the receiver side, and this reduces the spectral efficiency of the system. It is clear from the discussion about the pilot allocation that a better system performance can be obtained when the system is adaptive [52, 59, 60, 66]. In this case, the information about the channel statistics becomes very critical. The pilot allocation in the frequency domain requires the delay spread estimation, whereas the one in over OFDM symbols (over time evolution) requires Doppler spread estimation. If these estimates are available, then a pilot scheme using just the right amount of pilots can yield an acceptable performance. If this information is not available, then the pilot scheme can be designed based on the worst channel condition, that is, the maximum expected delay and Doppler spreads. In addition to unknown channel statistics, randomly generated pilots can be utilized for the reduction of interference from adjacent cells. However, it is shown via simulations that such pilots cause severe degradation in the channel estimation MSE [67]. So far the pilots in the frequency domain are discussed. In some cases, the estimation can be performed using the data in time domain, that is, data before the FFT block at the receivers. Training symbols for this case can be set to all 1s in frequency domain that result in an impulse in the time domain. When this impulse is passed through the channel, then CIR can be obtained. By careful arrangement of 1s in frequency domain, the multiple replicas of the CIR can be obtained, and these can be improved through noise averaging. In a similar way, PN sequences superimposed with the data

can be utilized for the channel estimation. In such a case, correlators at the receiver can be used for the expected samples of the OFDM symbols [6870]. However, it is shown that superimposing training with data is not optimal for channel estimation [71]. Having reviewed the pilot schemes employed in OFDM systems, it is time to look at the channel estimation techniques. Starting from the methods using the least a priori information, in this article we will review channel estimation methods such as LS estimation, ML, transform domain techniques, and LMMSE. Simple interpolation techniques will be covered along with LS estimation technique.

LS ESTIMATION
Before going into the details of the estimation techniques, it is necessary to give the LS estimation technique as it is needed by many estimation techniques as an initial estimation. Starting from system model of SISO-OFDM given in Eq. 17 as[72] Y[n, k] = X[n, k]H[n, k] + W[n, k], the LS estimation of H[n, k] is Y [n,k ] W[ n,k ] H LS [ n,k ] = = H [n,k ]+ . X[ n,k ] X[ n, k] In matrix notations, H LS = diag(X)1Y + diag(X)1W.
^ ^

(20)

(21)

(22)

Note that this simple LS estimate for H LS does not exploit the correlation of channel across frequency carriers and across OFDM symbols. The MSE of LS estimation of Eq. 22 is given by [73] MSE LS = K E H SNR (23)

where EH = E{H[n, k]}. LS method, in general, is utilized to get initial channel estimates at the pilot subcarriers [72], which are then further improved via different methods. It is also common to introduce CIR to Eq. 16 to exploit CIR length for a better performance [21, 74]. In this case, Eq. 16 can be modified as [74] Y = diag(X)Fh + W where H = Fh. The LS estimation of Eq. 24 is then H = QLSFH diag(X)HY where QLS = (FH diag(X)Hdiag(X)F)1. (26) The above LS estimation will be referred as time domain LS. When no assumptions on the number of the CIR taps or length are made, then the time domain LS reduces to that of frequency domain, and it does not offer any advantages. However, with the assumption that there are only L number of channel taps, which then reduces the dimension of the matrices F and hence Q, an improved performance due to the noise reduction can be obtained [75, 76]. The resultant LS estimation has higher computational complexity than the frequency domain LS but the performance increase is the plus side of the approach. The increase in the performance can be considered as the exploitation of subcarrier correlation. A comparison study showed that when the frequency domain LS also exploits the correlation of the subcarriers, then its performance can be that of time domain LS (21). Further compari^

(25)

24

IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2nd Quarter 2007

son studies showed that based on the SNR information, either method can be used [74]. For example if the SNR is low then the time domain LS can be less accurate as additional filtering in time domain is based on less accurate CIR length. In this case, the probability of not accounting for all the taps and discarding some of them are high. However, for other SNR regions, the time domain LS gives better results as it utilizes a more accurate CIR length. The use of time domain LS becomes inevitable when OFDM is combined with MIMO systems [77]. This will be explored more when channel estimation techniques for MIMO systems are presented. Similar to the time domain LS, the ML estimate of the CIR taps for the same system model given in Eq. 24 can be derived. With the assumption of L channel taps and Np number of pilot subcarriers, the ML estimate of the channel coefficients is shown to be [58, 78],
^ H H HML = (Fp Fp)1Fp diag(X)HY

(27)

where F p is N p L truncated unitary Fourier matrix. In the above formulation, for the sake of simplicity, it is assumed that pilots symbols are from PSK constellation and hence diag(X)Hdiag(X) = IK, and they do not appear in the parenthesis for the inverse operation. It can be observed that when the number of pilots is greater than the channel length and the noise is AWGN, the time domain LS estimate in Eq. 25 is equivalent to the ML estimate given in Eq. 27 [58, 79]. Furthermore, it should be noted that the ML estimate given in (27) makes the assumption about the CIR length, which improves the performance of the estimation accuracy [80]. Unlike LMMSE channel estimation, both LS and ML are based on the assumption that the CIR is a deterministic quantity with unknown parameters. This implies that LS and ML techniques do not utilize the long term channel statistics and hence are expected to perform worse than the LMMSE channel estimation method [58]. However, the computational complexity is the main trade-off factor between the two groups of the channel estimation techniques. Before introducing the other channel estimation techniques, it is worthwhile to review the methods used for the training sequences as well as the pilot subcarriers. The corresponding implications on the channel estimation techniques will also be covered briefly.

this is one of the algorithms employed for IEEE 802.11a/b/g and fixed WiMAX systems. However, these approaches introduce an error floor for non-constant channels, that is, outdoor channels. The highest performance degradation occurs at the symbols farthest from the training symbols. For video transmission systems, the critical information can be sent over the symbols closer to the training symbols, while non-critical information can be sent over those farther from the training symbols [29, 30]. It is observed that such an arrangement can improve the performance without increasing the number of training blocks. However, for systems requiring equal priority packets like data networks, such an approach cannot be taken. In this case satisfactory results can be obtained by increasing the rate at which the training symbols are sent at the expense of system efficiency. For the fast varying channels, interpolation methods can be utilized in time domain. Interpolating the channel linearly between the training symbols is one simple solution [59, 72, 82]. The disadvantage with such an approach is the latency introduced in the system [83]. Indeed, if the system can tolerate more latency, then the channel estimation for non-training OFDM symbols can be improved by higher order polynomials [66, 84, 85].

CHANNEL ESTIMATION TECHNIQUES IN PILOT MODE

In the pilot mode, only few subcarriers are used for the initial estimation process. Depending on the stage where the estimation is performed, estimation techniques will be considered under time and frequency domains techniques. In frequency domain estimation techniques, as a first step, CFR for the known pilot subcarriers is estimated via (22). These LS estimates are then interpolated/extrapolated to get the channel at the non-pilot subcarriers. The process of the interpolation/extrapolation can be denoted as
^

H = QHLS

(28)

where Q is the interpolation/extrapolation matrix. The goal of the estimation technique is to obtain Q with lower computational complexity but at the same time is to achieve higher accuracy for a given system. In this subsection, the calculation of matrix Q for simple interpolation techniques will be discussed. Piecewise Linear Interpolation Two of the simplest ways of interpolation are the use of piecewise constant [86] and linear interpolation [22, 84, 87, 88]. In the piecewise constant interpolation, the CFR between pilot subcarriers is assumed to be constant, while in piecewise linear interpolation the channel for non-pilot subcarriers is estimated from a straight line between two adjacent pilot subcarriers. Mathematically, for piecewise constant interpolation, Q is a matrix consisting of columns made up from shifted versions of the column vector c = [1,1,,1, 0,, 0 ]T ,
Dp

CHANNEL ESTIMATION TECHNIQUES IN TRAINING MODE

As mentioned before, in the training mode, all the subcarriers of an OFDM symbol are dedicated to the known pilots. In some systems like WLAN or WiMAX, two of the symbols are reserved for the training. If the training symbols are employed over two OFDM symbols, for very slowly varying channels, the channels at two OFDM symbols for the same subcarriers can be assumed to be the same. In this case, the estimates can be averaged for further noise reduction [72]. If the noise variances of the OFDM symbols are different, then Kalman filtering can be used such that noise variances are exploited as weighting parameters [81]. Once the channel is estimated over the training OFDM symbols, it can be exploited for the estimation of the channels of the OFDM symbols sent in between the training symbols. Depending on the variation of the channel along time, different techniques can be utilized. A very common method is to assume the channel being unchanged between OFDM training symbols [23, 2830, 69]. In this method, the channel that is estimated at training symbols is used for the subsequent symbols until a new training sequence is received. The channel is then updated by using the new training sequence, and the process continues. In fact,

where D p is the spacing of the pilots. For the the piecewise linear interpolation, Q consists of coefficients that are a function of the slope of the line connecting two pilot subcarriers and the distance of the pilots to the subcarrier for which the channel is to be estimated. In the first method, acceptable results can be obtained if the CFR is less frequency selective or the CIR maximum excess delay is very small. Such a constraint makes the CFR at the subcarriers very correlated that CFR at a group of subcarriers can be assumed to be the same.

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In piecewise linear interpolation some variation is allowed between the pilot subcarriers. Such an approach can result in a lower MSE since noise averaging is performed. Moreover, when the channel becomes more frequency selective, the piecewise linear interpolation results in a better performance compared to the piecewise constant [8689]. For a better insight into the performance of the piecewise linear interpolation, its MSE is derived and is expressed in terms of the channel statistics and the pilot spacing as [87] 1 1 2 MSE = (5 + )(1 + ) R f [ 0 ] + (2 + 2 ) w 3 3
D p 1

basis functions are determined such that they are unity at the pilot locations at which they are defined for, and vanishes at the other pilot locations. The channel at non-pilot subcarriers can then be found as
Np

H [ n, k ] =

B p [n, k ]H [n, p],

p =1

(30)

l =0

1 (1 1){ R f [l ]} + (1 2 ){ R f [ D p ]} 3

(29)

where 1/ = Dp, Rf[l] is the frequency domain correlation of 2 CFR, denotes the real part of a complex number, and w is the noise variance. When the piecewise linear interpolation is to be performed between OFDM symbols over time, then the parameters above need to be replaced with their time domain equivalence. As can be seen from the expression, lower MSE results in: When many pilots are used When the noise is low When the channel is very correlated Higher Order Polynomial Fitting Piecewise linear interpolation requires more pilot subcarriers for an acceptable performance in highly frequency selective channels [52, 86, 89]. However, by using a priori information about the frequency or time selectivity of the channel, the use of higher order polynomial can result in better performance. Higher order polynomials indeed can approximate the wireless channels accurately, since the channel itself is smooth in both time and frequency domains [66]. The degree of this smoothness depends on the selectivity of the channel. For highly time and frequency selective channels, the higher the polynomial order, the better the estimation at the expense of higher computational complexity [23]. However, when the channel is changing very slowly both in frequency and time, then the use of very high order polynomials can degrade the performance, as the modelling uses noise as a means to represent the channel [66]. This behavior also suggests dynamic polynomial fitting based on the channel statistics [23]. Simulations show that adaptive polynomial fitting performs better than the static polynomial fitting when the channels become more selective [23]. In a move towards reducing the computational complexity of such an adaptation, instead of estimating the true channel statistics, variation of channel between two adjacent subcarriers can be monitored, and an idea of how fast the channel is changing can be obtained [90]. Further computational complexity can be achieved if the coefficients of Q are made power of 2 to eliminate the multiplication/division via bit shifting. It is observed that such an approach can yield accurate channel estimates [90]. In the higher order polynomial approaches, the entries of the Q are calculated by using more information about the channel. Higher order polynomial fitting uses more than two pilot subcarriers for the CFR estimation. While some of the polynomial fitting methods utilize no channel statistics [52, 91], others assume to have some information about the statistics [66, 85]. The most common higher order interpolation methods are spline interpolation [22, 60, 89], Gaussian interpolation [22], and polynomial fitting [66, 85, 91, 93, 94]. In the spline interpolation, basis function of some orders or Beizer curve are defined over a group of subcarriers [60, 84]. These

where Np is the number of pilots over a range, Bp[n, k] is the basis function at subcarrier k, and H[n, p] is the CFR at the pilot location p. The rows of the interpolation matrix, Q, are then formed using B p[n, k]s. For more frequency selective channels the order of the basis functions, B p[n, k]s, can be increased for a better performance. This corresponds to having more columns in Q, and implies the use of more pilot subcarriers for the estimation of a single subcarrier. Gaussian interpolation is another interpolation technique, where the coefficients of Q are obtained from a Gaussian function [95]. The Gaussian function resembles the sinc function, the ultimate function for ideal low pass filtering. The Gaussian function can be considered as an approximation to the sinc function. The width of the Gaussian function or equivalently the coefficients used in the interpolation are dependent on the frequency selectivity of the channel. Hence, as with many approaches, the knowledge of the channel statistics can improve the performance of the Gaussian interpolation. Similar to the Gaussian interpolation, radial basis functions utilizing Gaussian function are also used for the interpolation purpose [96]. The coefficients of the radial basis functions are determined through some non-linear training mechanism similar to those used in neural networks. Overall, the goal is to find the coefficients of the interpolation using the Gaussian function as a basis, and the training process indeed reflects the information about the channel statistics to the coefficients to be used in the interpolation. Hence, the approach of the radial basis function interpolation can be considered as an adaptive low-pass filtering. The improved performance due to this adaptation comes at the cost of training process using pilot subcarriers. 2-D regression models for the pilot subcarriers scattered in frequency and time domains are also studied [85, 94]. In these models, a 2-D polynomial whose coefficients are obtained using the channel correlation and the initial LS estimates at the pilot subcarriers is developed. Although higher order polynomials can be used, second order approximation is found to yield close to ideal BER performance for certain channels [85]. All of the above interpolators can be seen as a simple lowpass filter. This is due to the fact that CIR has a finite length that is in general much smaller than the number of subcarriers. The above interpolation methods are not ideal low-pass filters, and hence they introduce an error floor due to either the suppression of some of the channel taps or the inclusion of noise whose effect becomes effective at high SNR regions. A low-pass filtering can eliminate the noise in non-tap locations, which in turn means the elimination of most of the noise in the estimated subcarriers. For example, it is shown that the use of raised cosine filter as a low-pass filter provides accurate channel estimates for WLAN systems [28]. The sharper the low-pass filtering the better the estimates are. Since the Fourier Transform of a rectangular function (or a window) is the sinc function, the sinc interpolator with the known CIR length provides ideal low-pass filtering. However, sinc interpolator is not realizable in practical implementations. Moreover, it is computationally heavy as it requires more CFR samples.

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IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2nd Quarter 2007

4 Tap coefficients

-1 0 10 20 30 40 Tap index 50 60 70

studied for the channel estimation of OFDM based systems. Fourier [31, 84, 101, 104, 105], Hadamard [106, 107], Discrete Cosine [108, 109], Karhunen-Loeve Transform KLT [110], and 2-D Fourier Transformation [111] are few to name. In Fourier Transform, two techniques are investigated. In the very common approach, first the IFFT of the CFR is taken. The resultant transform domain is the time domain, where typically the channel taps are concentrated into a subregion. Figure 5 shows a typical CIR with significant taps and noise. By zeroing the terms out of this subregion that corresponds to noise, only the significant taps are retained. The noise reduced signal is then transformed back into the frequency domain via FFT operation. Mathematically, the process of the Fourier Transform technique for the channel estimation of OFDM based systems can be represented as [76],
H H FT = K / N p FD FT FP H LS

n Figure 5. Typical CIR samples with noise.

The low pass interpolation utilizes the extra information about the CIR length. Further improvement can be achieved with the information of other channel statistics [37, 97, 98]. However, if the channels are less frequency and time selective, then there is no need for very complicated estimation techniques, and the use of simple interpolators will do the job. Since computation of the information of channel statistics will need extra processing, systems unable to get the statistics can assume a worst case scenario for the typical application. Such systems can use an interpolator based on the assumed statistics throughout the application.

(31)

where K / Np is for the normalization, Fp is the Fourier matrix with the rows corresponding to the subcarrier index of the pilot tones, and DFT is given by DL D FT = 0 ( K L L ) 0( L K L ) . 0( K L K L ) (32)

TRANSFORM DOMAIN TECHNIQUES

It was mentioned that in general the CIR length is much smaller than the number of pilot subcarriers, that is, L < N p . When an orthogonal transformation is applied to the CFR at the pilot subcarriers, the transform domain contains L number of significant values, that is, values relatively having more energy or magnitude than the noise. Since the noise is assumed to be AWGN in frequency domain, it is AWGN in transform domain as well. If the significant values of the transform domain signal are retained, and the non-significant ones are treated as zero, then the noise term will be eliminated significantly especially when L < N p < [99]. For this operation, some sort of threshold is needed to differentiate between the significant values of the signal and noise terms. The CFR can then be obtained by applying the inverse of the orthogonal transformation, since such an operation will also achieve interpolation for non-pilot subcarriers [99, 100]. Once the CFR is obtained via a transform domain technique, the channel at subsequent OFDM symbols (over time) can be obtained via different methods. The filtering process of transform domain is usually followed by linear interpolation in time domain [101]. Wiener filtering is also found to be effective in noise reduction in time domain [102]. With Wiener filtering being optimum in the sense of minimizing MSE, it has been applied in both domains as well. This will be covered in the subsequent sections. The transform domain techniques exploit the information about the number of significant values in the transform domain and their location. Moreover, more number of pilot subcarriers are used for the interpolation process. Hence, they perform better than the simple interpolation techniques in general [103]. Different transform domain techniques are

The expression for DFT given above is applied in many transform domain based approaches using Fourier Transform, which in general neglects the correlation between CIR taps. By incorporating the CIR tap correlation and appropriately choosing the coefficients of DL, a full matrix that can result in lower channel estimation MSE can be obtained [76]. When the channel statistics are not available, then DL = IL can be used. In this case, Eq. 31 can be expressed as [76],
H H FT = K / N p FL FLp H LS

(33)

where FL and FLp contain only the first L columns of F and Fp, respectively. By examining Eq. 31, it can be anticipated that the pilots need not be chosen such that they sample CFR uniformly. However, the condition number of Fourier matrices increases for closely spaced pilots. Hence, when the pilots are not closely spaced, Fourier matrices with higher condition numbers can result in higher MSE in the presence of noise [31, 39]. Theoretically, in the presence of AWGN, the MSE of the Fourier Transform approach is shown to be minimum when the pilots are equispaced with maximum distance [39]. In terms of implementation complexity, Fourier Transform approach is computationally very efficient, thanks to FFT algorithms. The computational complexity of FFT algorithms are further reduced via the radix 4 operation with restrictions on the pilot spacing to be a power of 2 [52, 112]. Similar to the above Fourier Transform approach, instead of taking IFFT as an initial transformation, first FFT is performed over CFR samples [59, 29, 102, 113]. The equivalent transform domain taps are not concentrated into a subregion as they are in the CIR taps. The equivalent taps of this alternative Fourier Transform approach are shown in Fig. 6 for a 5 tap channel. As seen in Fig. 6, only the center region of the transform domain needs to be zeroed, meaning the identification of one more region. Mathematically, the above procedure can be

IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2nd Quarter 2007

27

6 Non-sample spaced Sample spaced

5 Equivalent tap coefficients

4 Tap coefficients

0 0 10 20 30 40 Tap index 50 60 70

0 0 5 10 15 20 Tap index 25 30 35

n Figure 6. Equivalent taps of fourier transform of CFR.

written as H FT = K / N p F H D FT 2 Fp H LS , (34)

n Figure 7. Equivalent CIR taps from CFR when the real taps
are not sample spaced. Transform approaches that use rectangular windowing, other window types like Hamming and Hanning can be used in the frequency domain. The effect of this windowing is removed when the CFR is transformed back from the transform domain. It is observed that this additional processing improves the performance of channel estimation when the taps are not sample spaced. However, since the aliasing effect is not completely removed, still at high SNR regions an error floor occurs. Another transform domain technique is studied via DCT [108, 109]. The main reason behind the use of this approach is to get better channel estimates when CIR taps are not sample spaced. In this approach, the effect of high frequency terms is mitigated by exploiting the property of DCT algorithm. DCT equivalently takes the symmetry of the CFR samples and introduce a 2K sequence with a smoother transition between the elements of 2K sequence. Here, the CFR samples are first passed through a DCT operation. Similar to the Fourier Transform approach, the energy corresponding to equivalent CIR taps is concentrated in subregions, whose length are much smaller than the dimension of the orthogonal transformation. The regions corresponding to non-tap locations are zeroed out for the noise elimination. The resultant transform domain signal is then passed through an IDCT operation to get CFR. Simulation results show that better results than the conventional Fourier Transform domain approach can be obtained [109]. However, as in the case of windowing operation for CFR samples, since the aliasing is not completely removed, an error floor still exists at high SNR region. The mathematical description of the DCT approach is similar to the second Fourier Transform approach with Fourier matrices being replaced by the DCT matrices. Although the same approach of taking the symmetry of samples can also be applied to the Fourier Transform approach, faster DCT algorithms than the FFT algorithms can offer a better computational complexity [109]. However, since OFDM based systems already has FFT algorithms on IC, additional IC will be required for the DCT implementation, increasing the cost of the modules. Very similar to the DCT approach, Hadamard and KLT transforms are also studied [106, 107, 110]. In these methods, the same steps as in Fourier Transform approach are taken so that the signal and the noise subspaces are separated. It should be noted that KLT has not been applied to OFDM based systems but is tested for single carrier MIMO systems.

where the entries of the DFT2 are the cyclically shifted entries of DFT along its diagonal elements. Studies are performed to compare the performance of both of the Fourier Transform approaches. When the number of significant taps are estimated correctly, both methods perform the same. However, since in the second Fourier Transform approach three regions need to be identified, in the presence of noise it is more prone to errors [59, 114]. In both of the Fourier Transform approaches, the noise within the significant taps is not eliminated. If the noise in the transform domain is completely independent, then there is not much to be done for removing the noise within the taps. However, if the noise in the transform domain is correlated, then by using the information about the noise in the non-tap locations, the noise in tap locations can be reduced. Studies show that this additional processing provides further improvement in the MSE of the channel estimation [115]. The Fourier Transform approach assumes the knowledge of the tap location. It is assumed that the taps are equally spaced with sampling time of the OFDM symbol. When the IFFT of the CFR is taken, the equivalent CIR is given by,
L 1

h( , t ) =

l (t )
l =0

sin( BW ( l )) , ( l )

(35)

where BW is the bandwidth of the OFDM symbol. If the CIR taps are sample spaced, then CFR is band-limited or CIR is time-limited, and hence the performance of the Fourier Transform approach is very close to the ideal low-pass filtering. However, if the CIR taps are not sample spaced, that is, l, then as can be seen from Eq. 35, the energy of the non-sample spaced tap is leaked to the other taps. With this, CFR is not bandlimited anymore, and there is aliasing. When the noiseonly taps are eliminated, this leaked energy is also removed, and hence some degradation occur as the total energy of the CIR taps is not preserved. Figure 7 shows the equivalent CIR taps from CFR when the real taps are non sample spaced. The aliasing due to non-sample spacing can be considered as the high frequency terms in the domain from which the transformation is performed. For this reason, windowing in frequency domain is applied in order to mitigate for the aliasing effect [116, 117]. In contrast to the conventional Fourier

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IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2nd Quarter 2007

Analysis showed that SNR improvement can be achieved, suggesting its application to MIMO-OFDM systems. Practical systems such as WLAN and WiMAX introduce guard bands in OFDM symbols via the elimination of the use of the subcarriers at the edge of the OFDM symbols. The transform domain techniques suffer from these unused subcarriers or suppressed subcarriers as this corresponds to rectangular windowing in frequency domain that results in sinc convolution in transform domain or equivalent time domain. Hence, the taps are leaked to one another due to sinc interpolation, and the taps orthogonality is lost. Since the transform domain techniques assume a certain channel length, L, K L taps are zeroed out during time windowing. When this windowing in time domain is applied for reducing the noise plus interference, it will cause Gibbs phenomenon when the signal in the transform domain is transferred back to the frequency domain. In other words, the channel frequency response will have ripples around the edge carriers. The reason for this is the truncation of the sinc function in time domain. Although no studies have been reported to overcome this issue, simple extrapolation via the use of correlation properties of the subcarriers (Fig. 4) can be employed before any transform domain approach. Although different transform domain techniques are studied, it should be noted that since the noise is assumed to be AWGN in the original domain, it will have its AWGN characteristic in the transform domain. The equivalent channel taps will be concentrated only in a small region. Therefore, as long as the equivalent taps are correctly identified in all the transform domain methods, the same performance will be achieved. Since the Fourier Transform approach utilizes fast algorithms in the OFDM transceiver structure, the use of Fourier Transform offers a better trade-off among the transform domain channel estimation techniques. When the CFR samples are also available over several OFDM symbols at the pilot subcarriers, 2-D Fourier Transform technique can be used [111, 118]. Here, the CFR samples at the pilot subcarriers are passed through a 2-D Fourier Transform. The transform domain signal is expected to have a diamond shape concentrated in a 2-D subregion. By zeroing out the signal values outside this subregion, noise reduction can be achieved. The resultant signal can then be transformed into the original domain via an inverse 2-D Fourier Transform. The performance of 2-D transform domain approaches depends on the appropriate transform domain filtering, which is related to the channel statistics. The transform domain techniques have been successfully applied to the cases where impairments to the system are modelled as Gaussian noise. For example, an OFDM system with significant PAPR can be improved via clipping, where the large peaks are replaced with a pre-defined envelope, A. The system model can then be modified as [119] Y = (cr diag(X) + )H + W
A/x,

ever, the first case is more critical than the second, as and hence in practice the CIR length is usually taken to be the length of the CP [36, 120, 121]. For more accurate results, algorithms are also developed to estimate the number of significant channel taps. This is needed especially in high data rate communication where the channel length can be long but the number of channel taps can be smaller, that is, sparse channel. The corresponding channel taps and their location can be searched based on a cost function assuming channel tap locations and the corresponding coefficients [122125]. In many cases, since the problem is similar to finding the tones of a signal, ESPRIT and MDL algorithms are employed to get the number and the location of the channel taps [11, 124126]. However, these approaches can yield degraded performance when the number of taps increases. Hence, other approaches based on iterative ML are proposed both to reduce the computational complexity and to get accurate estimation [123]. Moreover, taps searching based on the energy of the taps is also studied [102, 113, 127, 128]. Iterative algorithms like Newton-Lapsons method can also be utilized to get the channel taps [129, 130]. The use of PN codes superimposed with the data to reveal the channel taps is also widely applied [70]. The output of these correlators is related to CIR, which can be averaged further when the correlators result in multiple CIR copies. However, the performance of this approach suffer from the influence of the transmitted data that suggests an increase in the power of the PN sequence or time-consuming iterative methods [31]. Hence, transmitting data and the pilots over different subcarriers, and then using the correlators before the FFT block at the receiver is proposed [131]. In this method, a time domain signal obtained via the IFFT of the pilot signal is utilized to be correlated with the received signal. Ideally, the output of the correlator are the delayed impulses whose amplitude and delay are related to CIR. Having realized that the performance of the transform domain techniques are heavily dependent on the CIR tap locations, an inaccurate assumption or calculation of CIR tap locations can degrade any of the transform domain techniques drastically. Hence, a transform domain method which inherently uses the information of the channel taps is expected to provide better results. For this purpose, unitary transform based on the eigenmatrices of the auto-correlation of CFR of different channel PDPs is shown to give better results than the transform domain techniques presented above [107]. When the exact channel PDP is not available, then a channel PDP can be assumed and the transformation can be done accordingly. However, if the exact PDP is known then eigendecomposition of auto-correlation matrix of CFR can provide the optimum transform. In the following section, this optimum transform, a special form of LMMSE, is presented in detail.

(36)

LMMSE CHANNEL ESTIMATION

LMMSE is widely used in the OFDM channel estimation since it is optimum in minimizing the MSE of the channel estimates in the presence of AWGN. LMMSE uses additional information like the operating SNR and the other channel statistics. LMMSE is a smoother/interpolater/extrapolater, and hence is very attractive for the channel estimation of OFDM based systems with pilot subcarriers. However, the computational complexity of LMMSE is very high due to extra information incorporated in the estimation technique [22, 36, 58]. For a given linear system model in the form of y = Ax + w, (37)

x is the average energy where the clipping ratio, cr = of the input signal, and is the distortion caused by the clipping. With cr known, the effect of distortion can be reduced via transform domain techniques since the distortion approaches complex Gaussian distribution with zero mean. Simulations performed for this scenario showed that with the use of Fourier Transform technique, accurate channel estimation can be obtained [119]. The information about the CIR length is important in achieving higher performance in transform domain approaches. A CIR length taken to be smaller than the actual CIR length will eliminate the significant taps, while a channel taken to be longer will result in less noise suppression. How-

IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2nd Quarter 2007

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LMMSE of the variable x is given by,

^ x 1 = Ryx Ryy y

(38)

where Ryx is the cross-covariance between variables y and x. When the expression in Eq. 38 is applied to the OFDM channel estimation given in Eq. 16 with equal pilot spacing, Dp,
^

HLMMSE = RHHp ^ 2 (RHpHp + w (diag(X) diag(X)H)1)1 HLS

(39)

can be obtained. Here, Hp is the CFR at the pilot subcarriers, RHHp represents the cross-correlation between all the subcarriers and the pilot subcarriers, and R H p H p represents the auto-correlation between the pilot subcarriers. As can be seen in Eq. 39, LMMSE uses additional information in its estimation process such as the correlation between subcarriers and SNR. The LMMSE estimation of H in Eq. 39 is computationally very heavy. For example, the dependency on the transmitted symbols due to the matrix inversion required at each estimate needs many operations. Moreover, large sized, full matrix multiplication required for a single estimate increases the computational complexity of LMMSE as well. The non-trivial matrix inversion required in the LMMSE estimation is another factor increasing the computational complexity of LMMSE. Therefore, although LMMSE is optimal, without reducing its computational complexity, it is hard to realize its application in practical systems. The complexity of LMMSE can be significantly reduced if the LMMSE expression is made independent of the transmitted symbols. Although the expression inside the inversion operation also contains the term R H pH p, which is the autocovariance of the CFR at the pilot tones, R H p H p does not change for a large number of OFDM symbols since it is a function of channel PDP. Therefore, for a given large number of OFDM symbols, the term RHpHp can be assumed to be constant, leaving (diag(X)diag(X)H)1 as the constantly changing parameter from symbol to symbol. By assuming the transmitted symbols use the same signal constellation, the expression (diag(X)diag(X)H)1 in Eq. 39 can be replaced by the expected value of (diag(X)diag(X)H)1 [36]. That is, E {(diag(X )diag(X ) H )1} = I N p | 2} |2},

SNR

the channel PDP changes. Either due to the change in SNR or PDP, the channel estimation via Eq. 41 is computationally complex since it requires multiplications in the order of O(K3) for the channel estimate of a single subcarrier. The complexity of LMMSE is even higher for 2-D channel estimation of OFDM systems since the number of the total subcarriers is higher [24, 133, 134]. Hence, the complexity of LMMSE can be computationally prohibitive for practical 2-D channel estimation. For this reason, computationally efficient methods are proposed so that the benefits of LMMSE are realized both in 1-D and 2-D channel estimation. Subspace methods are investigated for the computational complexity and noise subspace reduction for the LMMSE channel estimation. With subspace methods, the number of multiplications required for the channel estimate of a single subcarrier is reduced by exploiting SVD [24, 36, 120, 135, 136]. Subspace methods applied to the LMMSE channel estimation reveal the degree of independency of the subcarriers auto and cross-correlation matrices. Since the subcarrier correlation is a function of the channel delay spread, it ultimately reveals long-term significant CIR taps or channel PDP. Without subspace methods, the complexity of the channel estimation using LMMSE can be reduced significantly by assuming a pre-defined channel length [75]. However, for sparse channels this would mean unnecessary computation when the significant number of channel taps is smaller than the channel length [122, 126]. With the CIR length being much smaller than the number of the subcarriers, SVD of the auto and cross correlation matrices of CFR result in only as many significant singular values as the significant number of CIR taps. As the noise is assumed AWGN in frequency domain, the SVD decomposition results in equivalent singular values for the noise terms. Hence, it can be anticipated that the noise in frequency domain is equally distributed in the subspace domain with equal energy in all dimension of the subspace. If the subspace due to the noise is eliminated, then noise reduction is achieved [126]. Moreover, due to the formulation of LMMSE, less number of multiplications will be required after the SVD operation. This will be seen more clearly with the following derivations. Starting from an all-pilot case that all the subcarriers are pilot tones, the LMMSE channel estimation can be re-written as, 1 H LMMSE = R H p H p R H p H p + I K H LS . SNR If SVD is to be performed over Hermitian RHpHp, RHpHp = UUH (43) (42)

(40)

E{1/|Xk with Xks being the constelwhere = E{|Xk lation points. Then, Eq. 39 becomes, 1 H LMMSE = R HH p R H p H p + I N p H LS . SNR (41)

It is recommended in some studies that such an approximation should not be assumed for the whole OFDM subcarriers, as the noise level can be different for various portions of the symbol [132]. In this case, a windowing approach can be applied to suppress the noise so that over the whole symbol the noise level is almost constant. The advantages of this approach comes at the expense of SNR estimation for each subcarrier and the additional filtering. Since it is observed via simulations that the approximation given in Eq. 40 has negligible performance degradation for the OFDM channel estimation, the SNR estimation for each subcarrier or subcarrier block is usually omitted [36, 120]. Although the expression in Eq. 41 is simpler, it still needs to be updated with the changing operating SNR. Moreover, the expression in Eq. 41 needs to be recalculated whenever

can be written. Here U is a unitary matrix and is a diagonal matrix bearing the singular values 0, 1, , K1 in descending orders. Then in Eq. 42 can be re-written as,
^

HLMMSE = UUHHLS,

(44)

where is a diagonal matrix with entries i i = , i + SNR

i = 0,1,, K 1.

(45)

With the above formulation, the corresponding MSE is expressed as [36],

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MSE LMMSE

1 = K + 1 K

K 1

i (1 i ) + SNR i2 i =0
2

^r Hlmmse

= Prr(Qr)HHLS, r are given by,

(48)

where the entries of the diagonal matrix (46) K i Dp i = K + D p i SNR 0

K 1

i
i =r

In the decomposition of Eq. 44, the number of multiplication is still in the order of O(N3). The number of multiplication can be reduced if only significant singular values of or are considered. It should be noted that the number of significant singular values is related to the number of long-term significant taps. The relationship between these two will be given shortly. Since the number of significant taps is much lower than the number of the subcarriers, there will be only a few significant singular values in or . Therefore, the entries of matrix can be approximated as i i = i + SNR 0 i = 0,1,, r 1 , i = r,, K 1 (47)

i = 0,1,, r 1

. (49)

i = r,, N p 1

Here, the superscript r represents only the first r columns of matrices, P = FV and Q = FpV. Here, V is the unitary matrix from the SVD of Rhh, the auto-correlation matrix of CIR. The singular values of Rhh are denoted by 0 1 , , K1. The MSE of the above estimator is shown to be [120], 1 r 1 MSE (r ) = K i 1 i K i =0 Dp + 1 K
K 1

2 + i2 SNR (50)

K i .
i =r

where r represents the number of the significant singular values. The above is nothing but the result obtained from the low-rank approximation of the R H p H p . With the low-rank approximation, the number of required multiplications reduces from the order O(K3) to O(rK2). Although the low-rank approximation via a SVD of the auto-covariance matrices reduces the number of multiplication for the channel estimation, obtaining the SVD of the auto-covariance matrices by itself is computationally very complex and is in the order of O(K3) [137]. Therefore, it will be no use to exploit the low-rank approximation if the SVD is to be performed for every estimation process. Although, the auto-covariance matrix, R HpHp, is a function of the channel PDP that can be assumed to be constant for a good number of OFDM symbols [138], when the channel PDP changes the re-computation of SVD of RHpHp can be non-practical especially when the number of the subcarriers is large. For this reason different approaches are proposed in order to eliminate the need for SVD operation. The so called robust channel estimation methods are developed for this purpose [36, 139, 140]. In these methods, a channel PDP is assumed for the system under the consideration, and the auto-covariance matrix and its SVD are then pre-calculated for the assumed channel PDP. The most common assumed channel PDPs are uniform and exponential, with uniform PDP being used more extensively [13, 126]. Simulation results show that robust LMMSE channel estimation results in acceptable performance degradation for certain systems when compared to the LMMSE with perfect channel knowledge [13, 111]. The degree of degradation increases as the true channel deviates significantly from the assumed channel. By pre-calculating the SVD of the auto-covariance matrices for more possible channel PDPs, this degradation can be mitigated. In this case, by looking at the delay spread of the channel, the closest channel PDP for which the SVD is pre-calculated can be used. With additional computational complexity needed for the delay spread estimation, this approach is found to improve the MSE performance of the robust LMMSE channel estimator by a factor of 2 dB [139]. The low-rank approximation for LMMSE channel estimation has also been investigated for the pilot symbol aided channel estimation [24, 36, 136]. It is shown that for the pilot symbols similar simple expressions to those of all pilot case are also possible [120]. For the pilot case,

The low-rank approximation for the pilot case requires r(Np + K) multiplications for the channel estimation of all the subcarriers. Although this is computationally very efficient compared to the multiplications in the order of O(K3), still the need for the SVD of the auto and cross-covariance matrices of CFR makes the real-time LMMSE estimation almost impossible. Therefore, the methods enabling real-time LMMSE estimation are needed. A close examination of low-rank LMMSE channel estimation shows that for the real-time LMMSE unitary matrices Pr and Qr are needed as well as the SNR and r significant singular values of RHpHp or Rhh. Since Pr and Qr matrices are related to each other, if one of them is obtained the other can be calculated easily [120]. It is noted that subspace tracking can enable real time lowrank LMMSE channel estimation of OFDM systems [120]. Subspace tracking has been introduced in adaptive filtering when the signal under consideration has a subspace with a dimension less than the number of the data snapshots. This is a very common case for oversampled systems. In such scenarios, the adaptive filtering requires SVD of large-sized matrices. Subspace tracking avoids SVD of large-sized matrices by tracking the significant singular values and the corresponding singular vectors [141, 142]. In OFDM based systems, since the number of significant taps determines the dimension of the signal (CFR samples) subspace, and since in most cases this is much smaller than the number of subcarriers and pilot tones, oversampling will be observed. Hence, subspace tracking can be applied to track the few significant singular values and the corresponding vectors of the matrices RHH or RHpHp, that is, tracking Pr, r, or Qr with a computational complexity in the order of O(Kr). However, subspace tracking can only be started after some initial channel estimates that need to be obtained via some other methods like transform domain techniques. Subspace tracking has been investigated for OFDM based systems in [121] and [138] via different approaches. In the first study, for example, the channel estimates at the pilot tones are transformed into the time domain by using the singular vectors of the auto-covariance of the CFR. This approach is applied in all the pilot case, and produces no mismatches when the CIR taps are uncorrelated and monotonically decreasing. In this case, the P matrix is simply the unitary

IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2nd Quarter 2007

31

Fourier matrix and is used for the transformation of channel estimates in frequency domain. The transformation using the matrix consisting singular vectors of the auto-covariance matrix of CFR eliminates the noise subspace and hence improves the performance. The second study, on the other hand, projects the CIR estimates onto the delay subspace so that only the significant taps are considered. The method bears the fact that there will be only small number of time instances at which the value of the CIR taps are significant. These time instances are then tracked using the channel estimates at the pilot tones. The tracking of the delay subspace can be considered as a pre-filtering before interpolation/extrapolation that improves the performance of the LS estimate at the pilot subcarriers. Different subspace tracking methods are analyzed for the tracking of the delay subspace, and it is observed that delay subspace tracking in the order of O(Kr) can give accurate results [143]. Since the subspace of CFR or CIR are related, both studies essentially perform the same task: noise subspace elimination. Since subspace tracking is more towards oversampled systems, the number of pilot subcarriers need to be higher than the number of significant taps, otherwise performance degradation will be observed especially in high SNR region. Similar to subspace tracking, LMMSE coefficients are tracked via NLMS and RLS algorithms [144]. In these methods, the CIR taps are updated based on the cost functions defined for NLMS and RLS. Although NLMS is less complex and less accurate compared to RLS, care must be taken in RLS algorithm for oversampled systems, as the performance can be faulty due to implicit matrix inversion needed during update operation [145]. 2-D LMMSE Since the computational complexity of 2-D LMMSE is high, several methods are proposed to eliminate this heavy computation. Among the methods is the use of two cascading LMMSE filters, thanks to the separability of the channel correlation in frequency and in time [24, 133, 146, 147]. It is demonstrated that the use of two cascaded LMMSE performs as accurate as the 2-D LMMSE [24, 133, 148]. This way the computational complexity is reduced from O((2N)3) to O(N 3 ), that is, an 87 percent decrease in computational complexity. While one of the filters uses the frequency domain correlation between subcarriers, the second filter uses the correlation of the subcarriers over the time. The filtering can either be done first in frequency or time domain, followed by the filtering in the other domain. The correlation of the subcarriers over the time depends on the mobility of the stations, and hence the Doppler the shift. Therefore, 2-D LMMSE requires channel statistics in time domain as well. In some cases, the need of channel statistics in time domain can be eliminated by using simple linear interpolation [149]. Although computationally more efficient, for very time selective channels more pilots will be needed over the time for an acceptable performance. Similar to 1-D LMMSE, low-rank 2-D LMMSE channel estimation is also studied [24]. It is observed that the low-rank approximation yields better results with lesser computational complexity when compared to non-low rank 2-D LMMSE. Since the computational complexity is highly dependent on the number of subcarriers, via the use of lesser subcarriers, the computational complexity can be reduced significantly. Such a thinking has brought the use of 2-D LMMSE over many subregions [24, 147] or piecewise LMMSE concept [87]. In fact, piecewise LMMSE is first considered for 1-D channel estimation in frequency domain where the noise level is considered to be different at each subregion [150]. Subregioning implies that the subcarrier correlation is only limited to the

those within a given neighborhood, ignoring the correlation between the subcarriers in different subregions. While for more frequency and time selective channels no significant gain is possible with the use of correlation between all subcarriers, for relatively less frequency and time selective channels, better performance can be achieved with the use correlation between subcarriers in different subregions. The 2-D LMMSE filter order is therefore very critical for obtaining more accurate results. Doppler and delay spread information can be used for this purpose. Once these two parameters are incorporated, it is observed that more accurate channel estimation than the conventional LMMSE is possible [133, 147, 150]. With Doppler and delay spread parameters being available, pilot spacing can also be determined so that the pilots sufficiently sample the channel response both in time and frequency domains. When the Doppler and delay spread estimation cannot be done in real-time, as a rule of thumb, the required pilot numbers can be taken twice of that required by the sampling theorem [134]. Robust channel estimation is also investigated for the 2-D LMMSE channel estimation [13, 134]. Similar to the channel statistics assumed in the frequency domain estimation, the auto-correlation of the subcarrier over time evolution is assumed to follow the zero order first kind Bessel function. This function is then based on a maximum assumed Doppler shift, resulting in the well-known Jakes Doppler spectrum [13, 33]. Simulation results also show that robust 2-D LMMSE channel estimation results in an acceptable performance degradation in some mismatch scenarios [13, 111]. The reason that the robust channel estimation gives good results even in a mismatch scenario is due to the use of channel statistics that can be considered as a coarse approximation of the true statistics. As it will be seen later, the role of the channel statistics in LMMSE will be visible with accurate estimation of SNR. When SNR is not available, then the use of channel statistics alone in robust LMMSE will not bring a desired improvement given the computational complexity. This topic will be more elaborated in the next section.

DECISION DIRECTED CHANNEL ESTIMATION

DDCE is one of the earliest methods studied for OFDM, mainly because of its popularity in legacy systems. In the earlier studies, DDCE was applied mostly in training based systems, where one or more OFDM symbols were used as the training symbols. The main idea behind DDCE is to use the channel estimation of a previous OFDM symbol for the data detection of the current estimation, and thereafter using the newly detected data for the estimation of the current channel [31, 151, 152]. Data detection can be based on hard or soft decision [153]. While for the hard decision a specific constellation point is forced, for the soft decision bitwise detection is utilized [154]. Since soft decision utilizes more information about the incoming signal and soft-decoding, for the sufficient number of iterations, near ideal performance can be observed [155, 156]. Once the data at the subcarriers is detected, any methods described in the previous subsections can be used to estimate the current channel. Although DDCE is simple, it inherently introduces two basic problems: the use of outdated channel estimates, and the assumption of correct data detection. The use of outdated channel estimates does not pose a serious issue when the channel is varying very slowly. In this case, the channel can be assumed quasi-static over a number of OFDM symbols [32, 72]. It was observed that such an approach results in acceptable performance as long as the channel variation is slow over the time. However, when the channel starts varying faster,

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100

then the outdated channel estimates for the previous OFDM symbol are no longer valid for the use of the data detection in the current OFDM symbol [55, 73]. In this case, the data detection would be incorrect, so are the newly estimated channel coefficients. Hence, the error in the channel estimation and data detection build up to make the system performance unacceptable [157]. This error propagation becomes more critical when the the number of incorrect decisions increases at low SNR regions [158, 159]. As a quick solution to overcome the problem related to the outdated channel estimates, the training symbols can be sent more often. The time instances at which the training symbols should be sent can be based on different criteria. Training symbols can be sent periodically where the period is predetermined for a given system [159]. Moreover, the change in channel estimates can be monitored to determine whether a channel estimation is indeed needed [160]. As the channel varies fast over the time, the need to send the training symbols more frequently has a high penalty in terms of the overall system efficiency [49]. In this case, training symbols can be replaced by the pilot subcarriers [161]. When pilot subcarriers are used in DDCE, the conventional channel estimation methods can be used as long as the number of pilot subcarriers is sufficient. The pilots can be sent over each OFDM symbol, or with the knowledge of channel statistics, they can be sent with certain OFDM symbols. For example, a reliable subset of data subcarriers can be employed as the pilot subcarriers [162, 163]. The channel estimated at the reliable subcarriers can be used to estimate the channel at the other subcarriers via interpolation. Although sounds to be a good solution, the lack of reliable information about the subcarriers and the high probability of the reliable subcarriers being non-uniformly distributed over the OFDM symbol reduce the performance of this approach. By increasing the power level of the reliable subcarriers, the performance degradation can be mitigated to some extent [163]. Another approach can be the use of prediction algorithms on the channel estimation. The channel estimated in previous OFDM blocks can be used to predict the channel in the next block [73, 164, 165]. Prediction algorithms can be applied either on the channel taps or the channels at the subcarriers [81]. The previous has the advantage that the number of variables to predict is much smaller but needs IFFT to get the channel at the subcarriers [166]. The latter requires no transformation but it requires the prediction of more number of variables, that is, subcarriers. Besides, since the prediction is performed individually for each subcarrier, the correlation properties of the subcarriers are not utilized that results in a worse performance when compared to the prediction for the time domain channel coefficients [72, 73]. In frequency domain prediction, the number of subcarriers for which the prediction to be performed can be reduced so that the channel at the other subcarriers can be estimated by simple interpolation techniques. Depending on the complexity of the prediction algorithm, such an approach can result in a lower computational complexity. Linear relationship based prediction approaches can give good results in slowly varying channels, but their performance becomes unacceptable once the channel varies fast over time. Hence, prediction algorithms taking into account the channel statistics can perform better [6, 72]. Indeed, it was demonstrated that the use of ARMA modelling and Kalman filtering can result in substantial performance improvement in DDCE methods with prediction [159, 165, 166]. Whether it is through prediction or the use of detected signals, the channel estimation at each subcarrier can be passed through some filtering to obtain better estimates. Among the

BRSK QAM-4 QAM-18 QAM-84 10-1

BER

10-2

10-3

10-4 -10

-5

10 SNR [dB]

15

20

25

30

n Figure 8. BER performance of an OFDM system in 5 tap

Rayleigh fading channel with different modulations. methods, the transform domain methods, LMMSE, or the low pass filtering are widely applied [132, 167169]. Moreover, averaging the channel estimates at the subcarriers over a number of subcarriers is also shown to yield accurate results for slowly varying channels [170]. In the preceding paragraphs, it was stated that the performance of DDCE can be improved with the information of channel statistics. In some cases this information may not be available, or it may be desirable to improve the system performance further. In this case, efficient approaches to the data detection portion can be introduced for a more reliable channel estimation. Coding theory is probably one of the most widely fields applied to the data detection portion of the OFDM systems [146]. Figure 8 shows the performance of an OFDM system in Rayleigh fading in a multi-path channel without any coding. It can be seen that the performance is the same as the single carrier systems with flat fading. In the case of multipath, single carrier systems can use complex equalizers to improve the performance of the system significantly. The BER performance of OFDM systems shown in Fig. 8 is therefore unacceptable for practical systems employing high order modulation [171]. Hence, OFDM systems need to employ coding for an acceptable performance. In most studies, OFDM with coding is called as COFDM [154, 155, 171]. With coding available in OFDM systems, DDCE can exploit this information to improve the data detection. The typical coding mechanisms are RS, convolutional, trellis, turbo, and LPDC coding [35, 146, 155, 171175]. The output of the decoder can be further processed for the FEC to increase the performance of the detection process [32, 168, 176]. Simulation results of many studies showed that the BER performance of the channel estimation with coding is drastically improved compared to those without coding [146, 155, 171]. Below is a quick summary of the some of the coding techniques applied to OFDM systems. Since the coding techniques performance in OFDM based systems is out of scope of the current article, the papers cited in this subject and references therein can be referred for more detailed information. Some Coding Techniques Applied to OFDM Systems RS (outer coding) and CC (inner coding) are usually applied back to back in OFDM based systems [9, 177]. RS codes are linear block codes and are suitable for burst type errors. Their decoding process is relatively less complex. The CC are binary

IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2nd Quarter 2007

33

Coherent detection Channel estimator

Deinterleaver

Decoder Output

Channel estimator

Replica generator

n Figure 9. Joint iterative DDCE.

error correcting codes where input bits are mapped to another set of bits, by not only using the present bits to be encoded but also by the previous information bits. Viterbi decoder is usually employed in the decoding process. The CC are studied extensively for OFDM based systems, and are shown to yield improved BER performance with even improved PAPR performance [161, 178, 179]. Trellis codes are introduced by Ungerboeck [180] and are a special type of CC. Trellis codes provide a better performance/complexity tradeoff than lattices in the bandwidth-limited regime, although the difference is not as dramatic. The key ideas in the invention of trellis codes were the use of minimum squared Euclidean distance as the design criterion and the coding on subsets of signal sets using CC principles [181]. Trellis codes are usually combined with STC to improve the performance of MIMO-OFDM systems [35, 182, 183]. Turbo codes are introduced by Berrou et al., [184], and are a new class of iterated short CC. They are built from the parallel concatenation of two recursive systematic CC using a feedback decoder. Turbo codes can achieve a BER performance close to the Shannon limit [185] in an AWGN channel [178]. Since there are many subcarriers in an OFDM based system, and that the probability of all subcarriers to fade is low, Turbo codes applied to OFDM systems can lead to a high performing wireless system [186]. The LPDC codes are first proposed by Gallager in 1960s [187], but it has been ignored due to its high computational complexity when long codewords are to be designed [175]. Due to its parallelized structure, LPDC codes are easy implement via basic elements. LPDC codes have excellent performance in AWGN channels, and under certain conditions they can perform better than the turbo codes [175]. Hence, LPDC codes are being re-invented for OFDM based systems, as the new systems require relatively low complex LPDC codes. For example, IEEE 802.16e standard employs tile structure in uplink direction, where relatively less number of subcarriers are used for the pilots and data [177]. Moreover, the use of LPDC coding with STC is shown to yield 5-6 dB coding gain for MIMO-OFDM systems with reasonable computational complexity [174]. The channel estimation performance has an impact on the decoding process of the OFDM receivers [188]. Studies in this area model the channel estimation error as a Gaussian noise, where the noise power can come from different sources such as ICI as well as the channel estimation method itself [188190]. The analyses show that the channel estimation error becomes effective in system performance when the channel estimation error is greater that 30 dB [191]. This additional noise reduces the effective operating SINR of the decoder block in the receiver, thereby causing performance degradation. In fact, the analysis via simulations show that under the channel estimation error, the coding gain of the decoders reduces significantly [188]. Similarly, the BER analyses also indicate performance degradation due to channel estimation error (less than 3dB for uncoded case) [45, 192]. Hence, as pointed out in the introduction, for a better performing OFDM system, channel estimation block in the receiver should be very accurate. Iterative channel estimation algorithms can be exploited to minimize the channel estimation errors [156]. In these

approaches, the channel estimation can be found via any of the methods described in the preceding sections, and the estimates can be improved by remodulating the detected signals [154]. It is clear that when the number of iterations is one, then the approach is the same as the conventional approaches. However, for more iterations better performance is achieved at the expense of more~computation.

EM ALGORITHM
Among the DDCE channel estimation of COFDM, the EM is one of the most attractive methods. Mostly because EM algorithm also utilizes the error probabilities that are already being utilized by the decoders. For example, the maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoder used in turbo decoding can provide the probabilities of the transmitted symbols, which is exactly what the EM algorithm is looking for the channel estimation [193195]. Hence, computational complexity of EM algorithm is reduced significantly, making EM a good match for the COFDM channel~estimation. The EM algorithm consists of two steps: an expectation and a maximization step. The motive of the expectation step is to estimate the corresponding component of the transmit signal in the received signal, whereas the motive of the maximization step is to estimate the channel given the transmitted signals, which can either be the pilots or the detected symbols. With the pilots being available more accurate results can be obtained [196]. In the above description, the detected signal can come from a decoder. The decoder itself however, requires channel estimate (Fig. 9). This chicken-and-the-egg problem can be solved iteratively with some initial values either assigned to the channel or the detected signals. While it is common to employ EM algorithm in the channel estimation part, for the data detection part different decoders can be employed. For example, in parallel to the mostly applied turbo coding and the corresponding decoders, it was shown that EM algorithm can also be integrated with a QRD-M algorithm using CC [197]. Iteratively performing the channel estimation and data detection with sufficient number of iterations are shown to give very close BER performances to the ideal case [193]. The inherent iterative approach of EM does not necessarily need the channel statistics. With a sufficient number of iterations, EM algorithm converges to the ML algorithm [40], which was shown in the previous sections to be equivalent to LS. However, due to EMs iterative nature, the computational complexity is relatively less [40]. For the EM algorithms to converge rapidly, the initial assumed/estimated values are critical. The above iterative scheme described for the EM algorithms can also be generalized as joint and iterative channel estimation (Fig. 9). Joint and iterative channel estimation techniques are introduced when the conventional DDCE channel estimation techniques are unable to estimate the channel in fast fading, when it is desired to reduce the pilot overhead, or when the non-linear distortions like power amplifier non-linearities make the conventional approaches ineffective [153, 154]. For example, by using relatively less number of pilots (less than the Nyquist rate), it is shown that the joint iterative approaches can detect the symbols, and estimate the channel simultaneously with more computational complexity [48]. For non-linear distortions, iterative methods can extract the distortion, and the channel estimates can be improved accordingly [153]. Based on Fig. 9, different combination of the coherent detection, channel estimator, and the decoder algorithms are proposed. For example, Kalman filtering is employed to esti-

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102

mate the time domain channels, while QRD-M is employed for the data detection part [198]. Due to its inherent iterative approach, RLS is also combined with DDCE techniques to estimate the channel, and is shown to provide accurate results [55, 176, 199, 200]. Since the number of tracking parameters are less in time domain channel and that RLS can be erroneous in oversampled systems [142, 145], the RLS is not recommended over the frequency domain channel parameters. The transform domain techniques, LMMSE, and ML algorithms are also studied for the joint iterative channel estimation where the channel estimates and data detection are improved over each iteration [26, 99, 154, 192]. The use of space-time and space-frequency block decoder is more common in MIMO-OFDM systems in these iterative approaches [35, 176, 201203]. For example, Kalman tracking coupled to the Viterbi decoder in the decoding of a space-time trellis coded MIMO-OFDM system is observed to give accurate results, where the ambiguity of the start of the decoding process is eliminated by using a single pilot subcarrier [35]. With the space-time codes being orthogonal, it is shown that LMS can be successfully applied to MIMO-OFDM systems [204]. Unification of Channel Estimation Approaches The channel estimation techniques proposed so far basically offer a trade-off between the complexity and the performance. Figure 10 shows the performance of methods in an exponentially decaying 5 tap channel. While LMMSE offers the best performance especially at low SNR regions, its complexity is the highest among the given techniques. This can be attributed to the fact that LMMSE uses more information during the estimation process. If LMMSE uses as much information as any other method, then the performance should be very similar if not the same. Hence, LMMSE can be considered as the generalized channel estimation method. In this section, circumstances for which LMMSE reduces to the other methods will presented.

101

LS Linear Transform domain LMMSE

100 MSE 10-1 10-2 10-3 -20

-15

-10

-5

0 SNR [dB]

10

15

20

n Figure 10. MSE of some of the channel estimation methods in

Rayleigh fading for a 5 tap channel with QAM-4 modulation and pilot spacing, Dp = 4. As it was demonstrated before that ML is the same as LS when the noise is AWGN, LMMSE also reduces to ML when SNR is very high.

UNIFICATION WITH TRANSFORM DOMAIN TECHNIQUES

In this subsection, the unification of LMMSE with the Fourier Transform technique will be presented. The unification of LMMSE with the other transform domain techniques is also possible if the LMMSE estimation is performed in the corresponding transform domain technique. Since in the preceding sections frequency domain LMMSE is presented, the unification with the Fourier Transform technique will be presented. As most of the transform domain techniques are exploited for the pilot subcarrier aided OFDM channel estimation, the LMMSE formulation for the pilot subcarriers with equal spacing will be used, and the case of non-equal pilot spacing is very similar. Starting with the matrix equation, Hp = Fph, (55) the auto-covariance matrix of CFR when all the subcarriers are used as the pilots can be expressed as E {HHH} = E{Fh(Fh)H} RHH = FRhhFH. (56) (57)

UNIFICATION OF LMMSE WITH TIME DOMAIN LS APPROACH

The formulation of time domain LS was presented previously. By rewriting the OFDM system model in terms of the CIR, Y = diag(X)Fh + W Then LMMSE can be written as [75],
^

(51)

HLMMSE = FRhh 2 [(FHdiag(X)Hdiag(X)F)1w + Rhh]1 (FHdiag(X)Hdiag(X)F)1 FHdiag(X)HY

The SVD of Hermitian Rhh is in the form of, Rhh = VVH. By normalizing F column-wise (making each column unity norm), (52) Rhh = FnVK(FnV)H, where Fn = F/K. Let PKPH.

(58) = P, then (59)

FnV

With Rhh being invertible,

^

HLMMSE = F 2 [(FHdiag(X)Hdiag(X)FRhh)1w + IK]1 Hdiag(X)Hdiag(X)F)1FHdiag(X)HY (F can be obtained. The LS estimation was given by [75], HLS = F[FHdiag(X)Hdiag(X)F]1 FHdiag(X)HY.
2 w

RHH =

(53) (54)

The above equation is nothing but the SVD of R HH. When the CIR taps are uncorrelated and are monotonically decreasing, then the unitary matrix P is simply the unitary FFT matrix. Similarly, R HH p = P RH pH p = Q K Q H Dp K Q H , Dp (60)

is very small, and Note that when SNR is very high, LMMSE reduces to time domain LS approach. Hence, if SNR information is not available, there is no need to employ LMMSE with SNR set to a high value since the same performance can be achieved with less computational complexity offered by time domain LS.

(61)

n where Q = F p V and pilot spacing is chosen to be D p . With

IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2nd Quarter 2007

35

CIR having L taps, is in the form of L | 0 L ( K L ) (62) = | , 0 ( K L ) L | 0( K L )( K L ) Since it is assumed that Np > L, by truncating to the size K N p to form N p , and Q to the size of N p N p to form QNp. Then, R HH p = P K N pQ H p , N Dp (63)

accordingly. In this section, the effect of interferers will be treated separately. First the effect of ICI will be considered, followed by the inclusion of external interferers in the channel estimation process. A short discussion of ISI is presented when ICI due to frequency synchronization error is covered.

OFDM CHANNEL ESTIMATION WITH ICI

Again starting from the system of SISO-OFDM, the received signal in the presence of ICI can be expressed as, Y = FFHX + W, (69) where the external interferers are folded into the AWGN term. Here, since CIR is not constant over the OFDM symbol, is not a circulant matrix anymore. Hence, the product of FFH is not a diagonal matrix [205]. In this case, a received signal at a subcarrier k is affected by the transmitted signals of all the subcarriers, increasing the number of unknowns by K*(K 1). This also implies that when the number of subcarriers increases, the ICI increases as well [148]. The ICI power mainly depends on the product of maximum Doppler frequency and OFDM symbol duration [33]. Hence, while the long symbol duration of OFDM symbols avoids ISI significantly, under very fast changing channels, this advantageous parameter turns into a disadvantageous parameter due to ICI enhancement. The ICI power at the center subcarriers is expected to be higher than the edge subcarriers since they are affected more by the ICI of the other subcarriers. ICI also occurs when there is a frequency offset due transmitter/receiver oscillator mismatch, phase noise, and/or the non-linear power amplifier effect. The oscillator mismatch or the phase noise cause the received signal to be sampled at incorrect positions, and thereby taking the effect of all the subcarriers [79, 206], that is, orthogonality loss. When left without compensation, this effect reduces the performance of channel estimation methods, especially those based on fixed channel statistics [25]. Either due to the frequency offset or the fast-varying nature of the CIR taps, ICI needs to be compensated so that reliable channel estimation is obtained. When higher order modulation techniques are employed, the effect of ICI is more severe as the detection of the modulated signal needs to differentiate many closely spaced constellation points. In this article, these two effect will be presented independently, and the details are given in the subsequent sections. ICI Due to Frequency Offset ICI due to frequency offset mostly occurs due to the loss of synchronization of the subcarriers or the phase noise of the oscillators. In WLAN and WiMAX standards, in the preamble, two short duration OFDM symbols are provided for the synchronization purposes [9, 78, 170]. These short symbols can also be used for the frequency offset estimation. Under the synchronization errors (both time and frequency), the correlation properties of the OFDM subcarrier change in time and frequency domains, the performance of LMMSE channel estimation algorithms degrade significantly as these estimation algorithms utilize the correlation properties of the subcarriers. It is shown that synchronization error can cause up to 5 dB MSE degradation of LMMSE channel estimation [207]. Hence, the synchronization errors need to be compensated for OFDM based systems. The compensation of ICI due the frequency offset is relatively less challenging compared to the compensation of the ICI due to fast channel variation since the value of the frequency offset parameter is constant over all the subcarriers. The received signal of a SISO-OFDM in the presence of fre-

RH pH p

K = QN p N pQ H p . N Dp

(64)

Since the first Np columns of Q form a unitary matrix, the overall equations denote the SVD of R HH p and R H p H p . By replacing the SVDs of the R HHp and R HpHp into Eq. 64, we get
^ H HLMMSE = PQNpHLS, ^

(65)

where the entries of the diagonal matrix are given by, K Dp i = , i = 0,1,, N p 1. K i + Dp SNR

(66)

In case of low-rank approximation, only r significant singular values of Rhh will be considered. Then,
^r HLMMSE

= PrGr(Qr)HHLS,

(67)

where the entries of the diagonal matrix r are given by Eq. 49. For high SNR, approaches to a diagonal matrix with diagonals being Dp. Moreover, when the CIR taps are uncorrelated and there are only L number of significant taps, then R hh is a diagonal matrix. In this case, V matrix becomes an identity matrix, making P and Q matrices simply F and F p , respectively. Moreover, the SVD of Rhh results in L number of significant singular values, making r = L. For equal spaced comb-type pilots
H H FT = D p FDFp H LS .

(68)

With the conditions described above, low-rank LMMSE becomes a transform domain technique using Fourier Trans form. Here, Dp comes from the normalization due to downsampled Fp. As can be seen from different methods, the use of more information increases the performance of the channel estimates at the expense of computational complexity. It is noted in the above sections that when the SNR information is not available and is set to a high value, then the performance of LMMSE reduces to the those of not utilizing SNR, with LMMSE still having high computational complexity. Hence, the use of other methods in case of no SNR information offers a better trade-off in terms of the performance and computational complexity.

OFDM CHANNEL ESTIMATION WITH INTERFERENCE

So far the effect of ICI, ISI, and external interferers were ignored, and the estimation techniques were performed

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IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2nd Quarter 2007

Y = Spdiag(X)H + W,

(70)

where Sp is the interference matrix representing ICI due to the normalized frequency offset p. Here, the entries of the interference matrix are given by S p ( m, n ) = sin ( m n + p ) j ( m n+ p ) e . K sin ( m n + p ) K (71)

Relative singular values strength

quency offset can be expressed as [208]

L CIR taps

ICI I Noise K

Although frequency offset estimation and its compensation have been studied in numerous articles, we will only consider those with the channel estimation. In these studies, the channel estimation, frequency offset estimation, and its compensation are performed jointly. Bearing the fact that the auto-correlation of CFR decreases as the frequency offset increases due to the random behavior of transmitted signals, an iterative binary searching algorithm based on the diagonal element of the Sep is performed by assuming maximum and minimum values for the frequency offset [208]. At each iteration step the CFR is estimated based on the assumed frequency offset and so on. Simulation results show that the frequency offset can correctly be estimated, improving the CFR estimates at the subcarriers. Moreover, by realizing that the channel estimation error is minimized when the correct length of the CIR is incorporated into the frequency offset expression, an iterative method aiming to find the first minimum of the MSE of the channel estimation based on Fourier Transform is developed [25]. With the use of Blackman window for filtering of the CIR taps, it is observed that frequency offset can be estimated and compensated with the proposed iterative method. Frequency offset compensation can be performed before the FFT block in the receiver side [206]. By comparing the CFRs with the compensated and uncompensated received signals, the frequency offset of the current symbol can be detected and then can be linearly interpolated to get the frequency offset of the all the subcarriers. The estimated offset value can then be used to predict the next frequency offset parameter. With a more computational complexity algorithm, studies exploited Kay filters for the frequency offset estimation by oversampling the pilot subcarriers [79]. Improved performance can be obtained via a prediction algorithm assuming linear variation over time. Since the frequency offset is assumed to be the same for all of the subcarrier, averaging can be introduced to reduce the noise significantly [79]. While frequency synchronization causes ICI, timing synchronization destroys OFDM symbol orthogonality and causes ISI. Hence, timing synchronization also needs to be considered when performing channel estimation. Timing synchronization error causes both carrier and time dependent phase rotations [209]. Therefore, the single pilot tracking used for common phase rotation is not sufficient to compensate for the timing synchronization error. The compensation for this case needs at least two OFDM subcarriers to be tracked both in frequency and time domains so that the slope of variation of the phase rotation is determined [209]. For efficient system utilization, time and frequency synchronization and channel estimation can performed jointly [210, 211]. ICI Due to Fast Fading Channel When the CIR taps vary over the duration of OFDM symbols, for an accurate channel estimation, the CIR taps values corresponding at each sampling instance need to be obtained so that the corresponding CFR is estimated. As mentioned earlier, this implies an underdetermined set of equations as the number of unknowns

Transform domain

n Figure 11. Classification of singular values representing different system parameters. is more than the number of equations. In order to reduce the number of equations, the CIR taps corresponding to each time sample of the OFDM symbol can be correlated via some basis functions. The knowledge of CIR taps at couple of sampling points can then be sufficient to estimate the CIR taps at the other time instances. In this case, a set of reduced CIR parameters, r , can be related to the complete CIR, , parameters as [212], = Q r (72) where Q is the interpolation matrix. Different approaches are studied for the CIR taps evolution over the time. The most frequently used method is to assume CIR taps varying linearly [82, 212, 213]. Moreover, interpolation via low-pass filtering can be utilized for a better estimate in time selective channels [205]. If the CIR taps follow the Jakes channel model [214], taps variation then follows first-kind zero-order Bessel function [212]. In this case, the parameters of the Bessel function can be found by locating its first zero crossing via the examination of the subcarrier correlation evolution over time. At the expense of more computation, the CIR taps can be modelled as an AR process [215], whose coefficient can obtained from the channel statistics. Some studies tried to model the ICI as AWGN and applied the methods which give good performance under AWGN [189]. In one of such studies, 1-D and/or 2-D LMMSE is employed in the channel estimation of OFDM in the presence of ICI [149, 216]. It is observed that since ICI increases the noise level, the number of pilot subcarriers required for the same MSE performance of no ICI case increases by a significant amount. Hence, one way of compensation of ICI is to increase the number of pilots in the frequency domain. In fact, when the singular values of the auto-covariance of CFR under the presence of ICI and noise is analyzed, it can be observed that the singular values can be grouped under three categories. The first group will have L number of similar singular values with L being the number of significant CIR taps. The second group will have I (I < K) number of similar singular values, and the rest of the singular values correspond to the AWGN. In these grouping, the values of singular values are largest for the first group and smallest for the last group assuming that the CIR taps are not buried in the noise. Figure 11 shows this scenario. When a low-rank LMMSE is to be performed on a system with ICI, then most of the ICI will be cancelled except those overlapping with the singular values

IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2nd Quarter 2007

37

0.8

0.6 Channel coefficient

0.4

0.2

-0.2

-2

2 Subcarriers

n Figure 12. Typical four orthogonal OFDM subcarriers. Note

that sampling at the incorrect points leads significant interference. that correspond to the CIR taps. Still, the use of low-rank LMMSE would give a low MSE since it eliminates most of the subspace corresponding to the ICI. Hence, LMMSE is used widely in the channel estimation of OFDM with ICI [33, 148, 149, 217]. For the OFDM channel estimation using transform domain techniques, the information about the channel length is therefore very important in order to reduce the effect of ICI. With a known CIR length, it is observed that the use of transform domain techniques reduce the ICI significantly [113, 130]. However, efficient methods obtaining the CIR length need to be developed. In addition to the methods described in transform domain techniques about the CIR tap identification, similar methods are proposed when ICI exists. For example, the CIR length under the presence of ICI is found iteratively starting from a longer CIR length than expected [25]. Similarly, the channel length is obtained by correlating the first two short OFDM symbols in the preamble of the WLAN systems with the local short symbols [80, 167]. In this correlation process, similar to the methods using PN sequences, the channel taps are revealed, so is their length. Pilot Spacing in the Presence of ICI In the previous subsection, it was mentioned that in the presence of ICI more pilot subcarriers are needed for an acceptable performance. If the number of pilots is to be increased, then it is more appropriate to place the additional pilots next to the existing ones since the ICI is more severe in the adjacent subcarriers (Fig. 12). Bearing this observation in mind, a small subset of subcarriers are considered to be responsible for the ICI in a subcarrier within the group [218]. Simulation results show that such pilot arrangement improves the channel estimation performance significantly. Similarly, in early studies two out of phase adjacent subcarriers were employed as the pilots to mitigate for the effect of ICI [91]. Instead of finding the optimum pilot locations via simulations, for a frequency selective channel, theoretical approaches are carried out for the pilot placement under the presence of ICI [205, 213]. The approaches showed that in the presence of ICI the pilots should be all grouped for the optimum elimination of ICI. However, for a frequency selective channel this would not sample the CFR appropriately, and hence performance degradation would occur for the frequency selective channels. In order not to have degradation for the frequency

selective channels, the clustered pilot scheme is offered to be the optimum solution. In this scheme, the group of pilots would be equispaced over the OFDM symbol. This theoretical finding is nothing but the solution found via simulations in [91, 218]. The need for the clustering can be explained as follows. When the CIR taps vary over the OFDM symbol, they need to be sampled frequent enough in time domain so that the corresponding CFR can be obtained. For example, if uniform time domain pilots are employed, then their Fourier Transform would give concentrated pilots in the transformed domain. In fact, when all the time domain samples of OFDM are assigned to be pilots, then their Fourier Transform would give an impulse in the frequency domain. Hence, in order to compensate both time and frequency domains channel variation, the pilots needs to be grouped and then uniformly distributed in the frequency domain [82]. The analysis performed for the channel estimation of ICI demonstrates that the performance improvement can be achieved with the information of channel statistics. This is either needed for the optimum pilot allocation and the lowrank LMMSE or the transform domain techniques intended for the low-pass filtering.

OFDM CHANNEL ESTIMATION WITH EXTERNAL INTERFERENCES

The channel estimation techniques presented in the previous sections treated the interference from other systems or sources to be part of the AWGN. As long as the interference is like AWGN, the methods described in the preceding sections can be utilized safely as they are mostly developed for the AWGN. However, OFDM systems can suffer from the impulse noise, which completely destroys the information carried over the subcarriers [219, 220]. In such circumstances, instead of trying to estimate the channel at the subcarriers via the sent data, the estimates at the impulse-free pilot subcarriers can be utilized. Based on the channel selectivity, a number of good estimates at the neighborhood of the destroyed subcarriers can be used both in time and frequency domains, and using the past and future estimates. The pilot subcarriers affected by the impulse noise can be detected by looking at their energy level, as their energy will be much higher in the presence of impulse noise. Similarly, the performance of OFDM channel estimation is investigated in the presence of narrowband interference [34]. By modeling the narrow-band interference in frequency domain as a complex Gaussian variable, an overall noise term including the narrow-band interference with a modified variance can be obtained. With the use of a generalized ML estimation, that is, M-estimation method, results better than those not accounting for the narrowband interference can be obtained when narrowband interference exists in the system [34]. OFDM channel estimation is also performed for the synchronous and asynchronous interference where the noise term in OFDM system model is defined as [221, 222],
Ni

W [ n, k ] = W [ n, k ] + I q [ n, k ]
q =1

(73)

where N i is the number of interferers, and I q[n, k] is the q th interference, which can be synchronous or asynchronous interference. It is assumed that for the synchronous case the interferers CPs are aligned with the users CP, while for asynchronous case the CPs are not aligned with the users CP. A ML estimation algorithm can be applied but the second order statistics of the interferers are needed. Efficient non-

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IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2nd Quarter 2007

Pilots

Cyclically shifted pilots

Ant #1

Space

Ant #2

Ant #3

Ant #4 Frequency Pilot subcarriers Data subcarriers Subcarriers

n Figure 13. Typical pilots for MIMO-OFDM.

iterative algorithms are developed for this purpose, and are tested through the simulations successfully [221, 222].

n Figure 14. Cyclically shifted pilots for MIMO-OFDM systems..

methods are successfully applied in MIMO-OFDM systems using pilots as in Fig. 13 [52, 104]. For SISO-OFDM systems, there was an upper bound on the pilot spacing that the pilot spacing should not be too large to cause an undersampled CFR function. For MIMO-OFDM systems using the pilot schemes given in Fig. 13, a lower bound is dictated so that the interference from the other antennas is eliminated. The pilot spacing, Dp, is then Ntx Dp K/L. (76) If WLAN standards are to be employed in a MIMO system, then the pilot allocation in two of the long OFDM symbol in the preamble for the channel estimation can be designed for a better performance [12]. Since in a typical WLAN environment, the channel varies very slowly, it can be assumed that the channel is constant over training OFDM symbols [103]. In this case, the pilots arranged for the first OFDM symbol can be cyclically shifted so that the CFR is sampled uniformly at more points [54, 103, 223, 224]. Such an arrangement can also mitigate for the edge subcarrier errors since each antenna can transmit at least one pilot subcarrier close to the edge subcarriers. Figure 14 shows this scenario for Ntx = 4. In general, the pilots can be cyclically shifted by Ntx/NO,where NO is the number of OFDM symbols over which the channel is assumed to be constant. With the assumption of the channel being constant over the training phase, noise reduction can also be achieved via averaging [12]. During the averaging, better performance can be achieved if the channel samples are weighted according to their MSE performance or their noise [54. 91]. Although the comb-type pilots given in Fig. 13 for MIMOOFDM symbols simplify the channel estimation process, they introduce some drawbacks. Clearly, they reduce the spectral efficiency since many of the subcarriers are assigned to pilots, with most of them being the silent pilots. Moreover, the use of silent pilots increases the PAPR [60], a critical parameter for the power amplifier block in the transmitters. Hence, in contrast to the pilot scheme in Fig. 13, the transmission of the pilots for the same set of subcarriers are proposed (Fig. 15). When CFR estimation is to be performed over such a pilot arrangement, Ntx * Np unknowns are at present with only Np equations being available. Hence, instead of direct CFR estimation, CIR estimation of each MIMO channel is proposed. A receiver antenna then needs to estimate N tx CIR, each assumed to have the same L. It should be noted that this is a valid assumption for MIMO downlink as the transmit and receive antennas are co-located and hence are expected to

MIMO-OFDM CHANNEL ESTIMATION TECHNIQUES

MIMO-OFDM channel estimation is a challenging task as the received signal is the superposition of the signals from multiple transmit antennas, (Eq. 12). For the methods to be presented in this section, the ICI and other types of interference are folded into the AWGN term for the sake of simplicity. The MIMO-OFDM system model then becomes,
N tx

Yrx =

diag(X )tx Hrxtx + Wrx ,

tx =1

(74)

With the introduction of MIMO, the pilot arrangement has to be modified so that the existing multiple channels can be estimated. In the subsequent subsections, first pilot allocation for MIMO-OFDM, and then the corresponding techniques will be presented.

PILOT ALLOCATION IN MIMO-OFDM SYSTEMS

When MIMO-OFDM started to draw attention in wireless communication area, pilot allocation schemes that convert the channel estimation of MIMO-OFDM into the channel estimation of SISO-OFDM are proposed widely. In these pilot schemes, at a given pilot scheme, only one of the transmitter antennas sends its pilot signal at a given subcarrier while the others remain silent [72, 158]. Such a pilot scheme is shown in Fig. 13. WiMAX systems also use a similar pilot scheme that is suitable for two antenna case [9]. With the pilot scheme given in Fig. 13, it can be seen from Eq. 74 that the MIMO-OFDM received signal at the pilot subcarriers for a given receive antenna is reduced to Yrx[n, k] = Hrxtx[n, k]Xtx[n, k] + Wrx[n, k] (75)

where k Ptx with Ptx holding the pilot subcarrier indices for the transmit antenna tx. With the pilot subcarrier of each transmit antenna being disjoint, the received signal for disjoint pilot subcarrier indices results in as many SISO-OFDM equations as the number of pilot subcarriers. From that point on, the methods described in the previous sections can be applied for the channel estimation. For example, Transform domain

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39

K 1

qtx1tx2 [ n, l ] =
ncy Freq ue

* Xtx1 [n, k ]Xtx2 [n, k ]FK kl .

(83)

k =0

Finally, p can be expressed as, p1 p p = p Ntx where

Time

Space

(84)

ptx = (ptx[n, 0], ptx[n, 1], , ptx[n, L])T

Data subcarriers

(85)

Pilot subcarriers

and
K 1

n Figure 15. Overlapping pilots for MIMO-OFDM.

have the same channel PDP [3, 225]. With this, the number of unknowns that a receiver antenna has to estimate is Ntx * L. In CIR estimation, the pilots in the frequency domain now occupy the same subcarriers, and hence there is interference. Figure 15 shows the overlapped pilots. By assuming that the CFR for a given transmit antenna can be expressed as in Eq. 5, minimization of MSE in Eq. 74 with respect to CIR coefficients for a given receive antenna rx can be expressed as [77, 226],
K 1 k =0 kl Yrx [n, k ] hrxtx [n, l ]FK Xtx [n, k ] tx =1 l = 0 N tx L 1

ptx [ n, l ] =

* Yrx [n, k ]Xtx [n, k ]FK kl .

(86)

k =0

(77)

* FK kl Xv [ n, k ] = 0

where Xtx and Xv are the pilot subcarriers for the txth and vth transmit antennas with v = 1,, N tx . By rearranging the terms, at the time instant n in matrix notation
^ Qh = p

(78) (79)
^

or
^

h = Q1p.

Here, the entries of the h, Q, and p are expressed as h rx 1 h= h rx Ntx where ^rxtx is given as in Eq. 3. h Q11 Q= Q Ntx 1 where Qtx1tx2 and qtx tx [ n, 0 ] 1 2 = q tx1tx2 [ n, L 1] qtx1tx2 [ n, L + 1] qtx1tx2 [ n, 0 ] (82) Q1Ntx Q Ntx Ntx (81)

(80)

As can be seen, the dimension of the Q matrix is (N tx L NtxL), meaning more computational complexity with increasing number of transmit antennas and the CIR taps. This also implies that the knowledge of the CIR length is critical in attaining a low complex and more accurate channel estimation. It should be also noted that the entries of Q represent some form of cross-correlation between the pilot subcarriers, while those of p represent some form of cross-correlation between the received signal and the pilot subcarriers. Different approaches are proposed in order to eliminate the computational complexity associated with the calculation of the Q1. One of the approaches is the use of constant modulus signals for the pilot subcarriers so that the diagonal submatrices of Q are identity matrices [38, 51]. The matrix inversion is then eliminated by using a single step iterative approach that utilizes the previous channel estimates. Although this approach is less complex, performance degradation incur in such an approach in fast-fading channels. When the cross-correlation between the pilot subcarriers is zero, that is, orthogonal sequences, then further simplification arises in the channel estimate as the need for the previous channel estimate is eliminated [38, 51]. Based on the MSE of LS estimates, the pilots for different transmit antennas need to be phase orthogonal in addition to being equispaced and equipowered for a given minimum number of pilot tones and power [6]. For this purpose, Hadamard [67, 103, 227, 228], Golay [64], and exponential type [49, 60, 63] orthogonal sequences are used in many studies. Hadamard type codes have good auto and cross correlation characteristics and therefore are popular in communication systems requiring orthogonality. The Golay codes are found to yield lower PAPR [64]. The exponential type pilots do not only introduce orthogonal codes, but also simplify the channel estimation process [6, 38, 51]. The exponential type pilots are found to be optimum pilots and are given by
j

ttx [ n, k ] = t1[ n, k ]e

2 kL K

(87)

where ttx represent the pilots for the txth antenna. A close look at the exponential type pilots reveals some interesting behavior of the pilots when CIR is to be estimated. It is known that a phase shift in frequency domain corresponds to a time shift in the time domain. Hence, the phase of the pilots can be modified in such a way that when their IFFT is taken, their equivalent CIR representation is delayed in time domain. A careful design of the pilots can put the CIR parameters in distinct positions in time domain so that the

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IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2nd Quarter 2007

CIR corresponding to each transmit antenna can be separated easily. This property is initially proposed in [6] and [51], and was later investigated by Auer in different studies [229231]. It is concluded that such pilot schemes indeed provide accurate channel estimates when the channel is sample spaced. It can be seen in these approaches that for the separation of all the CIR taps belonging to different transmit antennas, each CIR tap needs to correspond to a distinct time position, which suggests thatN tx L K. The above idea can be extended to SISO-OFDM systems such that exponential type pilots result in multiple replicas of the CIR channel in the time domain signal. These replicas can be averaged in time domain to get better estimates [128, 232]. Shifting the phase of the pilots works very well in the sample spaced channels, however, significant performance degradation can occur when the channel is not sampled spaced. In this case, the paths interfere with each other, and the methods that can separate different taps will be needed. Windowing operation and IPIC-DLL methods studied for single antenna systems can be applied to compensate for the aliasing occurring due to non-sample spaced taps [117]. Moreover, Wiener filtering can be applied in time domain estimates for the separation of the CIR taps [233]. The CIR channels estimated via Eq. 79 can be further improved if it is passed through an optimum filter. An optimum filter coefficient however requires the information about channel PDP. Since in MIMO systems, the existence of multiple channels introduces multiple replicas of the same PDP, a quick and more accurate estimation of PDP can be obtained for the use in optimum filtering [225]. The space-time and space-frequency codes are also utilized in the channel estimation of the MIMO-OFDM systems. Before going into the details of these pilots scheme, it is worthwhile to visit the Alamouti type coding that pioneers the space coding [234]. Starting from two antenna case, the Alamouti schemes transmits two different signals at the same time instances. In the next time instance, a modified version of these signals are transmitted from the other antenna. This way transmitter diversity is achieved both in time and space. These transmitted symbols are called Alamouti codes that are more generally termed as STBC. For two transmit antennas, these codes are given by, s S = 1 s2
* s2 * s1

Baseband modulator

IFFT

CP

DK/2

CP

n Figure 16. Transmitter diversity with shifted pilots after IFFT

by the amount K/2. sity due to the delay spread is exploited [35]. In the application of space-frequency Alamouti coding, a group of subcarriers by as many as the number of transmit antennas are assigned to a group of Alamouti codes. The key assumption is that the CFR is constant over the group of the subcarriers. Such a scheme results in Ntx equations with Ntx unknowns per CFR for each subcarrier block. Depending on the system environment either STBC or SFBC coding scheme can be used. When the length of CIR is very small, then the use of SFBC can result in a good performance since the assumption of constant CFR over a number of subcarriers holds. However, for more frequency selective channels since the assumption of the constant channel no longer holds, performance degradation will result in. In this case, if the channel is less time selective, then the STBC can be applied in time domain. Similar to the SFBC, by assuming that the channel is constant by as many subcarrier as the number of transmit antennas, the pilot sequence after the IFFT of a transmit antenna is shifted by K/Ntx, and CP is added thereafter as shown in Fig. 16 [236, 237]. With such a scheme, only one block of IFFT can be used instead of Ntx IFFT blocks. The shift by K/N tx results in the symbols with different phase shifts in the frequency domain, which are used to separate the channel for each transmit antenna. Considering the two transmit and one receive antenna system, the received signal can be written as, Y[n, k] = [H11[n, k] + H12ejk] X[n, k] + W[n, k] (89) where X[n, k] is the only pilot symbol used for both antennas. With the assumption that the CFR is constant by as many subcarriers as the number of transmitter antennas, Eq. 89 can be written for two consecutive subcarriers, with two unknowns H11[n, k] and H12[n, k], which can be solved with two equations. As can be seen such an approach is nothing but some special version of the SFBC. This approach is also simulated for many transmit antennas, and it is observed that as long as the channel is not too frequency selective, then the performance of the estimation is acceptable [238, 239]. Similar to Alamouti coding, rate-one non-orthogonal space-time codes based on Hadamard codes are found to give accurate channel estimation with the latter offering less complexity [240].

(88)

where * represent complex conjugate. For the transmitted symbols to be estimated, the channel need to stay constant by as many OFDM symbols as the number of transmitter antennas. Then, the channel at the subcarriers can be obtained via a sufficient set of linear equations, and can be further improved via enhanced techniques such as Wiener filtering [135, 136]. When the channel is not constant by as many as the number of transmitter antennas, then this scheme suffers significant performance degradation. The Alamouti scheme is mostly investigated for two antenna schemes [10, 11, 135] although it can be generalized for more antennas. The use of Alamouti codes is mostly applied to the OFDM subcarriers in frequency domain, resulting in SFBC [128, 235]. SFBCs eliminate the need for the channel to stay constant by as many OFDM symbols as the number of transmit antennas but requires the channel in frequency domain to be constant by as many subcarriers as the number of transmit antennas. It can be observed that when the codes are applied to the subcarriers over several OFDM symbols, then the diversity due to the Doppler spread is utilized. In the case of SFBC, the diver-

MIMO-OFDM WITH SPATIAL CORRELATION

The use of multiple antennas in OFDM systems brings another dimension: spatial dimension. As with the frequency and time domains correlation, spatial domain correlation can also be exploited in the channel estimation of MIMO-OFDM systems. With uncorrelated CIR taps, the spatial correlation between the subcarriers having the same indices is just the spatial correlation between the antenna elements [37]. LMMSE filtering can be applied to the subcarriers across the space. It is observed that the use of spatial correlation can provide additional gain when the correlation is beyond 0.8 as

IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2nd Quarter 2007

41

10-1

No spatial filtering =0.99 =0.95 =0.90 =0.85

10-2

10

12 SNR [dB]

14

16

18

20

n Figure 17. MSE vs. antenna spatial correlation coefficients.

shown in Fig. 17. The use of spatial correlation is also investigated via Kalman filtering approach for the channel tracking in time domain [164, 166]. The studies showed that in the presence of spatial correlation channel tracking can still be performed with the state equations incorporating the effect of spatial correlation. In addition to these studies, spatial correlation is also found to improve the channel estimate of MIMO systems via a pre-filtering in time domain [98], where a time domain LMMSE channel estimation is exploited.

CONCLUSION
In this article, we present the most common methods applied in the channel estimation of SISO and MIMO-OFDM systems. The SIMO and MISO systems are not covered separately as the methods for SISO and MIMO can be easily modified to be applicable to SIMO and MISO systems. Throughout the analysis it is seen that there are three basic blocks affecting the performance of the channel estimation. These are the pilot patterns, the estimation method, and the signal detection part when combined with the channel estimation. As in many systems, each block can promise an improved performance at the cost of additional resources. Hence, the best combination of these three parameters depends on the typical application [60, 241]. Although the estimation techniques presented in this article are shown to be a subset of LMMSE channel estimation technique, instead of promoting one of the channel estimation techniques, the methods are presented for the scenarios they perform the best. Thus, a fully adaptive system can be developed by using each block when necessary.

performance with guard bands since transform domain techniques introduce CIR path leaks due to the suppression of unused subcarriers. Methods can be developed to eliminate the leakage problem by extrapolating the channel for the unused subcarriers, followed by a transform domain technique. Such an approach can reduce the path leaking significantly. An elegant combination of an extrapolation method and a transform domain technique can be developed so that a practical estimation method can be realized for WLAN or WiMAX systems. As adaptation is key to many systems, channel estimation techniques can be made adaptive by using the information from other physical layer blocks. For example, the information available at blocks such as timing offset estimation, frequency offset estimation, and the output of the decoder can all be used to determine the most appropriate channel estimation technique. Lastly, mobile version of WiMAX uses OFDMA in its uplink direction. The subcarriers in a given OFDMA symbol are distributed among different users based on a given tile structure and subchannels [177]. The pilot subcarriers for different tiles are no longer adjacent and the subcarrier spacing between tiles can vary. Although linear interpolation can easily be used for the channel estimation, utilization of long term channel statistics can improve the channel estimation performance. With the tile assignment changing continuously during the uplink transmission of OFDMA, the application of the existing OFDM channel estimation methods is not straightforward. Research can be performed on how to practically incorporate long term channel statistics on the uplink channel estimation of OFDMA systems for a better performing system.

MSE

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FUTURE DIRECTIONS
With OFDM now standing as a solid technology for future wireless systems, OFDM channel estimation techniques can be improved by incorporating the features of new technologies. It is well-known that one of the promising technologies is MIMO. However, channel estimation methods studied for MIMO-OFDM systems mostly overlook the effect of ICI due to high speed mobile and external interferers. The models that approximate ICI and external interferers as AWGN might simplify the estimation process but better results can be obtained by developing more accurate modelings. Moreover, the standards such as WLAN and WiMAX do not use certain subcarriers known as guard subcarriers. The use of transform domain techniques do not provide better

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BIOGRAPHIES
KEMAL OZDEMIR (kemal.ozdemir@gmail.com )received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey in 1996 and 1998, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY in 2005. He has worked for Philips between 2000 and 2003 and Triverity Inc., between 2004-2005. He was a visiting scholar at University of South Florida between 2003-2004. Currently, he is with Logus Broadband Wireless Solutions working on fixed/mobile WiMAX base stations. His research interest are the development of Signal Processing algorithms and their efficient implementation on FPGA's, development of MAC algorithms, and the signal integrity issues for the next generation wireless systems. HUSEYIN ARSLAN [SM] (arslan@eng.usf.edu) has received his PhD. degree in 1998 from Southern Methodist University (SMU), Dallas, Tx. From January 1998 to August 2002, he was with the research group of Ericsson Inc., NC, USA, where he was involved with several project related to 2G and 3G wireless cellular communication systems. Since August 2002, he has been with the Electrical Engineering Dept. of University of South Florida. He has alsobeen working for Anritsu Company, Morgan Hill, CA (as a visiting professor during the summers of 2005 and 2006) as a part-time consulting since August 2005. His research interests are related to advanced Signal Processing techniques at the physical layer, with cross-layer design for networking adaptivity and Quality of Service (QoS) control. He is interested in many forms of wireless technologies including cellular, wireless PAN/LAN/MANs, fixed wireless access, and specialized wirelessdata networks like wireless sensors networks and wireless telemetry. The current research interests are on UWB, OFDM based wireless technologies with emphasis on WIMAX, and cognitive and software defined radio. He has served as technical program committee member, session and symposium organizer in several IEEE conferences. He is editorial board member for Wireless Communication and Mobile Computing journal, and was technical program co-chair of IEEE wireless and microwave conference 2004.

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IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2nd Quarter 2007