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Transactions on Vehicular Technology
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. , NO. , 2020
Preamble Power Optimization based on Intrinsic
Interference Utilization for OQAM/FBMC Channel
Estimation
Wenfeng Liu, Da Chen, Member, IEEE, Stefan Schwarz, Senior Member, IEEE, Markus Rupp, Fellow, IEEE, and
Tao Jiang, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—Benefiting from high spectral efficiency, agility of
carrier aggregation and support for asynchronous transmissions,
offset quadrature amplitude modulation based filter bank mul-
ticarrier (OQAM/FBMC) is being developed as an attractive
alternative to cyclic-prefix based orthogonal frequency division
multiplexing (CP-OFDM) as the air interface technology for fu-
ture communications. However, its non-orthogonal nature results
in intrinsic interference among symbols and subcarriers, which
makes channel estimation in OQAM/FBMC significantly more
difficult than that in CP-OFDM. In this paper, we propose a
novel preamble design method based on intrinsic interference
utilization for OQAM/FBMC channel estimation. Specifically,
we build a preamble by triplets of subcarriers, each of which
is determined by a preamble power optimization problem that
minimizes the channel estimation mean square error (MSE)
at the central subcarrier. We derive the optimal closed-form
solution by exploiting the linearly dependent relationship between
preamble symbols and intrinsic interference weights. Moreover,
extensions to multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) setup capa-
ble of improving both spectral efficiency and channel estimation
performance are investigated. Theoretical analysis and simulation
results show the superiority of the proposed preamble design
method over the conventional methods in terms of channel
estimation MSE, bit error ratio (BER) and peak-to-average
power ratio (PAPR).
Index Terms—OQAM/FBMC, intrinsic interference, MIMO,
channel estimation, preamble design.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Cyclic-prefix based orthogonal frequency division multi-
plexing (CP-OFDM) is the most widely recognized broadband
transmission technique. It has been adopted in many current
terrestrial communication systems such as long-term evolution
(LTE), wireless local area networks (WLAN), and is being
Copyright (c) 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted.
However, permission to use this material for any other purposes must be
obtained from the IEEE by sending a request to pubs-permissions@ieee.org.
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation of
China with Grant number 61771216 and Innovation Fund of WNLO. The
review of this paper was coordinated by Dr. Sudhan Majhi. (Corresponding
author: Tao Jiang.)
W. Liu, D. Chen, and T. Jiang are with the Wuhan National Laboratory for
Optoelectronics and School of Electronic Information and Communications,
Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China (e-
mail: liuwenfeng@hust.edu.cn; chenda@hust.edu.cn; tao.jiang@ieee.org).
S. Schwarz is with the Institute of Telecommunications, TU Wien, 1040
Vienna, Austria, and also with the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Depend-
able Wireless Connectivity for the Society in Motion, TU Wien, 1040 Vienna,
Austria (e-mail: sschwarz@nt.tuwien.ac.at).
M. Rupp is with the Institute of Telecommunications, TU Wien, 1040
Vienna, Austria (e-mail: mrupp@nt.tuwien.ac.at).
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1
studied on satellite communications and radar-communication
integration [1], [2]. However, one major drawback of CP-
OFDM is the presence of sinc pulses on each subchannel,
with the first spectral side lobe being only 13 dB weaker
than the main lobe, resulting in severe out-of-band leakage.
Besides, the insertion of CP entails a significant loss in spectral
efficiency. Those weaknesses make it difficult to respond to
carrier aggregation and spectral compliance requirements in
cognitive radio networks [3], coexisting communications [4]
and opportunistic transmissions on fragmented spectrum [5].
Many alternative transmission techniques have been pro-
posed to resolve the above problems of CP-OFDM, among
which offset quadrature amplitude modulation based filter
bank multicarrier (OQAM/FBMC) is the most spectrally effi-
cient [6]–[12]. Compared to CP-OFDM, OQAM/FBMC avoid-
s the CP and thus exhibits a better spectral containment per
subcarrier by using well time-frequency localized prototype
filters. Besides, OQAM/FBMC has high tolerance for timing
and frequency synchronization errors and even supports fully
asynchronous multi-user operation modes, thereby reducing
the synchronization overhead and communication delay. As
a consequence of the above superiorities, OQAM/FBMC is
attracting increasing attention and is considered as a promising
technique for several communications systems [13], [14].
As an integral part of coherent OQAM/FBMC systems,
channel estimation is critical for the symbol recovery and sys-
tem performance. Training-based channel estimation methods
have been widely prevalent in modern communication systems
because of their low complexity advantage over blind channel
estimation methods. However, training design and associated
channel estimation in OQAM/FBMC are significantly more
difficult than that in CP-OFDM. Unlike CP-OFDM where
the orthogonality condition holds in the complex domain,
OQAM/FBMC only satisfies the orthogonality condition in
the real domain, which causes intrinsic interference among
neighboring symbols and subcarriers [15], [16]. This means
that training symbols employed for channel estimation would
be interfered by neighboring symbols even in undistorted
channels [17]. Consequently, the conventional training de-
sign methods in CP-OFDM cannot be directly applied in
OQAM/FBMC due to the intrinsic interference problem [18].
In the literature, many attempts have been made to resolve
the intrinsic interference problem in the training design of
OQAM/FBMC, which can be categorized in scattered pilots-
based and preamble-based ones [19]. In the scattered pilots-
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Transactions on Vehicular Technology
2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. , NO. , 2020
based methods, scattered pilot symbols are spread among data
symbols, which allow channel tracking over the payload part
of each data packet. In the preamble-based methods, preamble
symbols are sent at the beginning of each data packet to
provide accurate estimates for slowly varying channels.
In fast fading environments, pilot symbols scattered in time
and frequency domains allow a simple tracking of the channel.
Two basic methods have been proposed to address the intrinsic
interference problem in the scattered pilot design. The first
method, called the auxiliary pilot (AP) method, can eliminate
the intrinsic interference by inserting one dummy symbol at
the adjacent position of the pilot [20], [21]. This method is
simple and can achieve complete interference cancellation.
However, from the perspective of power efficiency, the AP
symbol has a significant power overhead, which can be 3.3
dB higher than the power of data symbols [22]. The second
method, called the coding method, can resolve the inefficient
power problem of the AP method by precoding the surround-
ing data symbols of the pilot [23]. However, this method
can only completely cancel the intrinsic interference to the
pilot when the number of data symbols involved in coding
is sufficiently large, which may lead to an increase in coding
complexity and is not suitable for high pilot density scenarios.
Based on these two basic scattered pilot design methods, some
other methods have also been proposed to further increase the
power efficiency as well as to reduce the complexity [24]–[26].
Compared to the scattered-pilots based methods, preamble-
based methods are of special interest in slowly varying
channels and generally enable better interference mitigation
[27], [28]. Focusing on preamble design for OQAM/FBMC
channel estimation, one mainstream approach is to insert
known symbols around the pilot so that the corresponding
intrinsic interference can be approximated and exploited to
improve the channel estimation performance. This is known
as the interference approximation method (IAM), which has
been widely investigated in OQAM/FBMC systems because
of its efficiency and simplicity. Many IAM variants have
been proposed and generally comprise three consecutive O-
QAM/FBMC symbols, with the middle OQAM/FBMC symbol
being used to estimate the channel. The first proposed IAM
method, denoted IAM-real (IAM-R), only carries real-valued
pilots in the middle OQAM/FBMC symbol, preceded and
followed by one null symbol [29]. The nulls are used as guard
intervals to avoid the intrinsic interference from unknown
data symbols to the pilots. In [30], the real-valued pilots
of IAM-R were replaced by complex ones, hence named
IAM-complex (IAM-C) and shown to be optimal in the
mean squared error (MSE) sense. However, its optimality is
restricted to the three-symbol preamble structure with nulls
being inserted at their sides. Considering that the first and
third OQAM/FBMC symbols in the IAM preambles can
also carry auxiliary symbols to further improve the channel
estimation accuracy, enhanced versions of IAM-R and IAM-C
as well as the duplicated preamble were proposed in [31]–
[33]. The duplicated preamble can be taken as a modified
version of the IAM preambles, which is formed by duplicating
a pre-calculated preamble unit at the time-frequency lattice
[33]. It was shown that the duplicated preamble outperforms
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all IAM variants in terms of channel estimation MSE and
bit error ratio (BER) performances. However, its preamble
unit is obtained without rigorous theoretical analysis and the
preamble duplication operation results in a high peak power
of the preamble signal at the OQAM/FBMC transmitter.
In this paper, a method of optimizing preamble power
based on intrinsic interference utilization in OQAM/FBMC is
presented and its superior performance over the conventional
preamble design methods is shown. Specifically, we build a
preamble by triplets of subcarriers, each of which is deter-
mined by a preamble power optimization problem that min-
imizes the channel estimation MSE at the central subcarrier.
This way, the intrinsic interference to the pilot at the central
position of each triplet turns into a benefit for estimating
the channel and the neighboring symbols are optimized to
maximize its effect. We find that the best channel estimation
performance can be achieved when pilots and corresponding
intrinsic interference weights exhibit a linear dependence
relationship. Besides, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
extensions capable of improving both spectral efficiency and
channel estimation performance are analysed and developed.
Numerical simulations confirm the superiority of the proposed
preamble design method over the conventional methods in
terms of channel estimation MSE, BER, and peak-to-average
power ratio (PAPR).
In order to further clarify the novelty of this paper, we
briefly summarize the main differences between the proposed
preamble design method and the conventional methods.
• In the proposed method, the preamble structure is con-
structed by triplets of subcarriers, where pilots and their
first-order neighbors are jointly designed. However, the
conventional IAM-R and IAM-C methods are restricted
to the three-symbol preamble structure, with zero symbols
on both sides.
• From an analysis point of view, the proposed method
theoretically achieves the optimal channel estimation
performance by performing preamble optimization under
the preamble power constraint at the transmitter. By
contrast, pilots in the conventional duplicated preamble
are selected empirically.
• The proposed preamble is partially random, and the phase
of different triplets can be arbitrarily chosen, which brings
the benefit of low PAPR. However, both the conventional
IAM and duplicated preamble design methods produce
significantly higher peak power at the transmitter due to
their deterministic and periodic structure.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The O-
QAM/FBMC system model is presented in Section II. The
proposed method of designing the optimal preamble for O-
QAM/FBMC channel estimation is presented in Section III.
The numerical analysis and simulated results are shown in
Section IV. The concluding remarks of the paper are made in
Section V.
The notations used in this paper are as follows. Bold
lower-case letters and bold upper-case letters denote column
vectors and matrices, respectively. The notation ∗ denotes the
convolution operation. The superscripts (·)T , (·)∗ and (·)H
represent the transpose, conjugate, and Hermitian operators,
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Transactions on Vehicular Technology

LIU et al.: PREAMBLE POWER OPTIMIZATION BASED ON INTRINSIC INTERFERENCE UTILIZATION FOR OQAM/FBMC CHANNEL ESTIMATION 3

jp n jp n
-
2 2
e e
M M
a0,n
2
g[ k ] g[ k ] 2
aˆ0,n
jp (1+ n ) j 2p k j 2p k jp (1+ n )
- -
M
e 2 e e M e 2

M M
a1,n g[ k ] s[k ] y[k ] g[ k ] aˆ1,n
2 2
› channel
噯 噯 噯 噯
jp ( M -1+ n ) j 2p ( M -1) k j 2p ( M -1) k jp ( M -1+ n )
- -
2 M
e e e M
e 2

M M
aM -1,n
2
g[ k ] g[ k ] 2
aˆM -1,n

Fig. 1. The equivalent baseband block diagram of an OQAM/FBMC system [12].

respectively. <{·} denotes the real part. The set of integer and means that even without channel distortion and noise, there
complex numbers are denoted by Z and C, respectively. The will be purely imaginary inter-subcarrier interference and/or
notation IN denotes an identity matrix of size N × N and inter-symbol interference after demodulation at the receiver
0M ×N denotes a zero matrix of size M × N . The modulus side, which is the so-called intrinsic interference.
and Euclidean norm are denoted by | · | and k · k, respectively. Under realistic communication environments, the transmit-
ted signal is degraded by multi-path fading and contaminated
II. S YSTEM MODEL with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) at the receiver
Figure 1 shows the equivalent baseband block diagram of an side. Let η[k] denote the complex AWGN with zero mean and
OQAM/FBMC system. The subcarrier spacing is 1/T with T variance σ 2 . Then, the baseband version of the received signal
being the time interval between complex-valued symbols. The is written as
OQAM/FBMC system transmits real-valued offset quadrature y[k] = h[k] ∗ s[k] + η[k], (3)
amplitude modulation (QAM) symbols, that is, the real and
imaginary parts of complex QAM symbols are extracted and where h[k] is the channel impulse response. We assume a
transmitted separately with time offset T /2. Then, the real- low frequency selective channel with a delay spread sig-
valued symbols on each subcarrier are linearly convolved with nificantly shorter than the symbol interval, which can be
a prototype filter g[k] that satisfies the perfect reconstruction consideredPreasonable in many practical cases [37]. Let
L −2jπmk/M
condition [34], and the output signals on all subcarriers are Hm,n = k=0 h[k]e denote the complex-valued
superimposed to produce a transmitted signal s[k]. channel frequency response (CFR) for subcarrier m at symbol
Let am,n denote the real-valued symbol being transmitted time n. Then, the demodulated symbol at the receiver side is
at the frequency-time (FT) index (m, n). Then, the baseband given as follows [38]
transmitted signal of the OQAM/FBMC system is expressed ym,n = Hm,n am,n + ja(i)


m,n + ηm,n , (4)
as [35], [36] | {z }
cm,n
M
X −1 X
s[k] = am,n gm,n [k], (1) where cm,n is the virtually transmitted symbol at that FT point,
(i)
m=0 n∈Z jam,n is the intrinsic interference to the symbol am,n , and
where M is the number of subcarriers and ηm,n is the demodulated noise given as
 
M j2πmk/M jπ(m+n)/2 ∞  
gm,n [k] = g k − n e e X M −j2πmk/M −jπ(m+n)/2
2 ηm,n = η[k]g k − n e e .
2
k=−∞
represents the synthesis basis that can be considered as a (5)
frequency-domain implementation of a time shift for g[k]. With a well time-frequency localized prototype filter, con-
In the undistorted channel, the perfect reconstruction con- tributions to the intrinsic interference mainly concentrate
dition based on the real-domain orthogonality of the O- on first-order neighbors of a symbol. Denoting by Ω1 =
QAM/FBMC system can be written as {(p0 , q0 )| p0 , q0 ∈ {−1, 0, 1} and (p0 , q0 ) 6= (0, 0)} the first-
( ∞ ) (i)
X
∗
order neighborhood of (m, n), the intrinsic interference jam,n
< gm,n [k]gp,q [k] = δm,p δn,q , (2) in (4) can be well-approximated as [29]
k=−∞ X m,n
ja(i)
m,n ≈ am+p0 ,n+q0 ζm+p . (6)
| {z }
p,q
ζm,n 0 ,n+q0
(p0 ,q0 )∈Ω1
where δi,j is a Kronecker delta function satisfying δi,j = 1
p,q m,n
if i = j, and δi,j = 0 if i 6= j. Apparently, ζm,n is a purely Apparently, the intrinsic interference weight ζm+p 0 ,n+q0
can
imaginary number for (m, n) 6= (p, q) and thus referred to as also be taken as the contribution of am+p0 ,n+q0 to the intrinsic
(i)
intrinsic interference weight in the remainder of the paper. This interference jam,n .

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4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. , NO. , 2020
Note that by taking the real part operation, one can eliminate
the intrinsic interference in (4) after channel equalization and
thus recover the original transmitted symbol without distortion
in the absence of noise. This characteristic is also called real-
domain orthogonality.
III. P REAMBLE DESIGN FOR OQAM/FBMC CHANNEL
ESTIMATION
Obtaining channel state information in OQAM/FBMC is a
nontrivial task due to the intrinsic interference. In this section,
we tackle the channel estimation problem in OQAM/FBMC
with the aid of a training preamble. We furthermore propose
an optimal preamble design method based on the construction
of triplets, which can obtain the optimal channel estimation
performance at the pilot subcarriers.
A. Channel estimation model and optimality condition
Regarding the intrinsic interference in (4) and (6), it has
been shown that the intrinsic interference weights for the
neighborhood (p0 , q0 ) ∈ Ω1 satisfy a symmetrical pattern for
any choice of the prototype filter [32]. The case of odd time
index n is detailed in Table I.
TABLE I
T HE INTRINSIC INTERFERENCE WEIGHTS FOR THE FIRST- ORDER FT
NEIGHBORS .
m,n
ζm+p 0 ,n+q0
q0 = −1 q0 = 0
p0 = −1 jρ jβ
p0 = 0 −jγ 1 jγ
p0 = 1 jρ −jβ
The quantities ρ, β, γ can be computed in advance based on
the prototype filter employed, whose analytical expressions are
omitted here for the sake of brevity. Please refer to [32] for a
more detailed discussion.
Note that the intrinsic interference at a given FT point
mostly originates from its first-order neighbors with a well
time-frequency localized prototype filter. Therefore, three con-
secutive OQAM/FBMC symbols are generally required in
the preamble-based channel estimation methods, wherein the
middle symbol is used to estimate the channel, and the first
and third symbols are used as guard intervals to avoid the
intrinsic interference from unknown data symbols. We denote
the pilot symbols by am,n , m = 0, 1, · · · , M − 1, n = 0, 1, 2.
Since the first-order FT neighbors of the pilot am,1 carry
known training symbols, one can approximate the value of
(i)
the intrinsic interference jam,1 according to (6) and Table I.
Hence, the virtually transmitted symbol cm,1 in (4) can be
calculated and serves as a pseudo-pilot to compute an estimate
of the corresponding CFR.
Since the preamble-based channel estimation is generally
applicable to time-invariant channels, the subscript n of Hm,n
is omitted in the following for notational simplicity. Then,
according to (4), the least-square (LS) channel estimate (also
maximum likelihood in this case) can be obtained as [39]
ym,1 ηm,1
Ĥm = = Hm + , (7)
cm,1 cm,1
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Transactions on Vehicular Technology
where cm,1 is the pseudo-pilot at that FT point and the corre-
sponding MSE is given by σ 2 /|cm,1 |2 . It is noted that resulting
from the overlapping nature of OQAM/FBMC signals, demod-
ulated noises across different FT points at the receiver side are
correlated [27]. But in practice this correlation is negligible
due to the use of well time-frequency localized prototype
filters in OQAM/FBMC systems. Besides, it can be easily
checked that the noise correlation does not have any impact
on the LS channel estimate [40]. Therefore, similar to some
previous works [29], [32], [41], [42], we will not consider this
non-whiteness of the demodulated noises in the subsequent
preamble design part. Moreover, we note that the distribution
of the intrinsic interference depends directly on the time
and frequency localization properties of the QOAM/FBMC
prototype filter. In general, a pilot would be interfered by its
first-order and multi-order FT neighbors. However, with a well
time-frequency localized prototype filter, most of the intrinsic
interference to the pilot is constrained within its first-order
neighborhood. In this case, the interference from its multi-
order neighbors is negligible and sufficiently small compared
to the interference from its first-order neighbors. Therefore,
we only consider the intrinsic interference from the first-order
neighbors in the process of preamble design.
In this paper, optimal preambles refer to those which
achieve the minimum channel estimation MSE at the pilot
subcarriers. Obviously, the channel estimation MSE decreases
q0 = 1 as the pseudo-pilot power increases. Therefore, we propose to
jρ maximize the pseudo-pilot power at the pilot subcarriers to
obtain the optimal channel estimation performance.
jρ
B. Optimal preamble design
This subsection aims at increasing the pseudo-pilot power as
much as possible and thus minimizing the channel estimation
MSE without increasing the preamble power at the transmitter.
To this end, we formulate an optimization problem for pream-
ble design, where the objective is to maximize the pseudo-pilot
power at the pilot subcarriers, subject to a preamble power
constraint at the transmitter.
Since the pseudo-pilot depends directly on the pilot and its
first-order FT neighbors, we propose to build the preamble by
triplets of subcarriers. We aim to maximize the pseudo-pilot
power at the central FT point of each triplet and obtain the
corresponding channel estimates at these central subcarriers,
whereas the rest of them are then obtained by linear interpo-
lation of adjacent subchannels. For each triplet, we denote the
preamble unit as a matrix X ∈ C3×3 based on the three-symbol
preamble structure, which is given as
 
x1 x4 x7
X =  x2 x5 x8  . (8)
x3 x6 x9
The vertical and horizontal directions of the
matrix X represent the frequency and time axis,
T
respectively. Let x = [x1 , x2 , . . . , x9 ] ∈ C9 and
w = [−jρ, jγ, −jρ, −jβ, 1, jβ, −jρ, −jγ, −jρ]T denote
the preamble vector and the intrinsic interference weight
vector, respectively. Then, according to (6) and Table I, the
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Transactions on Vehicular Technology

LIU et al.: PREAMBLE POWER OPTIMIZATION BASED ON INTRINSIC INTERFERENCE UTILIZATION FOR OQAM/FBMC CHANNEL ESTIMATION 5

pseudo-pilot at the central FT point of each triplet can be time index

Ă
compactly expressed as 0 1 2

Ă
0
c5 = jρx1 − jγx2 + jρx3 + jβx4 + x5 − jβx6 + jρx7 -r -b -r
+ jγx8 + jρx9

Ă
g -j -g
T
= [jρ, −jγ, jρ, jβ, 1, −jβ, jρ, jγ, jρ] [x1 , x2 , . . . , x9 ] -r b -r
m-1 r b r
= wH x. (9)
m -g j g Data symbols
With a constraint on the preamble power of each triplet, the

frequency index
m+1 r -b r
preamble optimization problem can be formulated as jr jb jr
H
max |w x|, (10a) - jg -1 jg

Ă
x=[x1 ,x2 ,...,x9 ]T
jr - jb jr
subject to xH x ≤ ε, (10b) M-1

Ă
where (10b) refers to the transmit power constraint. Without
loss of generality, ε is set to be one for simplicity. According Fig. 2. Frame configuration of the proposed optimal preamble.
to the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, the objective function (10a)
satisfies
|wH x| ≤ kwkkxk. (11) the same assumptions as in the previous single-input single-
output (SISO) case, the demodulated symbol at the r-th receive
Moreover, the two sides of (11) are equal if and only if w and antenna is given by
x are linearly dependent. Therefore, it can be inferred that the Nt
objective function in (10) can be maximized if and only if x is r
X
r,t t r
ym,n = Hm cm,n + ηm,n , 1 ≤ r ≤ Nr , (13)
collinear with w, which means x should be a scalar multiple
t=1
of w. Therefore, it is trivial to check that the optimal solution
r,t
to (10) can be expressed as where Hm denotes the CFR from the t-th transmit antenna to
the r-th receive antenna. Resorting to vector-matrix notation
T
x = κejφ [ρ, −γ, ρ, β, j, −β, ρ, γ, ρ] , (12) the MIMO input-output relationship is represented by
where κ is the power normalization factor satisfying ym,n = Hm cm,n + ηm,n , (14)
1 where
κ= p
2β 2 + 2γ 2 + 4ρ2 Nr T
 1 2
1+

ym,n = ym,n , ym,n , · · · , ym,n , (15)
and the phase term φ can be arbitrarily chosen. According to
(12), we conclude the pseudo-pilot power at the central FT T
cm,n = c1m,n , c2m,n , · · · , cN
 t
m,n , (16)
point of each triplet can be maximized on condition that the
first-order neighbors of the pilot are proportional to the conju-
Nr T
 1 2

gation of the corresponding intrinsic interference weights. In ηm,n = ηm,n , ηm,n , · · · , ηm,n , (17)
this case, one example of the proposed optimal preamble is
depicted in Figure 2 irrespective of the power normalization.
1,1 1,2 1,Nt
 
After estimating the CFR on the central subcarrier of each Hm Hm ··· Hm
2,1 2,2 2,Nt
triplet according to (7), the remaining subcarriers’ channel  Hm Hm ··· Hm 
Hm =  . (18)
 
gains are obtained by linear interpolation of those of the central .. .. .. ..
 . . . . 
subcarriers. Nr ,1 Nr ,2 Nr ,Nt
Hm Hm ··· Hm
It is worth emphasizing that the preamble discussed above,
known at the receiver, is partly random and the selection Just like the classic IAM preamble, the extension of the
flexibility of φ makes it possible to reduce the PAPR of the proposed preamble to MIMO is straightforward by generating
preamble signal, which can be regarded as a huge advantage a corresponding Hadamard matrix. Specifically, we repeat the
compared to the conventional deterministic preambles. proposed SISO preamble Nt times on each transmit antenna.
At the same time, in order to ensure the orthogonality of
different transmit antennas, we generate a Hadamard matrix
C. Extension to MIMO systems
of order Nt and insert sign changes accordingly. Taking
The input-output relationship for the corresponding demod- Nt = 2 as an example, Figure 3 depicts the proposed preamble
ulated symbol in (4) can be easily extended to the MIMO case. structure irrespective of the power normalization. Then, the
Consider a point-to-point MIMO system configured with Nt demodulated pilots at the central FT points take the form
transmit antennas and Nr receive antennas. For each given  1
cm,1 c1m,4

FT point (m, n), we denote the virtually transmitted symbol
 
ym,1 ym,4 = Hm + [ ηm,1 ηm,4 ] .
at the t-th transmit antenna and the demodulated noise at the r- c2m,1 c2m,4
th receive antenna by ctm,n and ηm,n
r
, respectively. Then, with (19)

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6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL. , NO. , 2020

time index time index time index time index

0 1 2 3 4 5 0 1 2 3 4 5 0 1 2 3 4 0 1 2 3 4

Ă
Ă

Ă
Ă
Ă

Ă
Ă

Ă
Ă
Ă

Ă
Ă

Ă
Ă

Ă
Ă

Ă
Ă
Ă

Ă
Ă
r b r r b r r b r -r -b -r r b 2r b r r b 0 -b -r
-g j g -g j g -g j g g -j -g -g j 0 j g -g j 2g -j -g
r -b r r -b r r -b r -r b -r r -b 2r -b r r -b 0 b -r

Ă
Ă
Ă

Ă
Ă
Ă

Ă
Ă
Ă

Ă
Ă

Ă
Ă
Ă

Ă
Ă
Ă

Ă
Ă

(a) (b) (a) (b)

Fig. 3. The first proposed preamble structure in the case of two transmit Fig. 4. The second proposed preamble structure in the case of two transmit
antennas, with (a) and (b) corresponding to the two transmit antennas. antennas, with (a) and (b) corresponding to the two transmit antennas.

According to Table I and the MIMO preamble structure at these central FT points can then be expressed as cni ,t =
depicted in Figure 3, it can be easily checked that the pseudo- wH Ti xt .
pilots satisfy c1m,1 = c1m,4 = c2m,1 p = −c2m,4 = cm , where It is important to remark that in the MIMO case, the larger
the magnitude of cm is equal to 1 + 2β 2 + 2γ 2 + 4ρ2 . the pseudo-pilot power is, the better the channel estimation
Therefore, the LS channel estimate is obtained as performance would be. To make the MIMO preamble design
  1 −1 easier and simpler, we construct the preamble to maximize the
Ĥm = ym,1 ym,4 D sum of pseudo-pilot magnitudes at the central FT points, sub-
cm 2 ject to a transmit power constraint. To ensure the orthogonality
1
= Hm + [ ηm,1 ηm,4 ] D2 , (20) of different transmit antennas, sign reversals that originate
2cm from the Hadamard matrix are also considered in the preamble
where D2 represents a 2 × 2 Hadamard matrix given by design. Let Dt,i denote the corresponding entry on the t-th row
  and i-th column of an Nt × Nt Hadamard matrix, which is
1 1
D2 = . equal to 1 or -1 [43]. Then, the preamble optimization problem
1 −1
is formulated as
The above preamble design and associated channel estimation Nt
X
Dt,i wH Ti xt  ,
 
process can be easily generalized to the case of other number max (22a)
T
of transmit antennas. For more details, the readers should xt =[x1 ,x2 ,...,x6Nt +3 ] i=1
refer to the MIMO-OFDM orthogonal training design [44] and xH ≤ ε,
subject to t xt (22b)
MIMO IAM preamble design [45].
Although the above MIMO extension method is straight- where (22b) refers to the transmit power constraint. Motivated
forward, it requires 3Nt OQAM/FBMC symbols as preamble by the optimal IAM-C preamble and the proposed preamble in
overhead. To improve the spectral efficiency, we propose the SISO case, the pseudo-pilots at the central FT points are
a simple heuristic method in the following to construct a assumed to be purely real-valued or purely imaginary-valued
shorter preamble, whose preamble overhead is merely 2Nt +1 in the optimal case. Therefore, the preamble optimization
OQAM/FBMC symbols. problem can be rewritten as
For the t-th transmit antenna, we represent the preamble
N 
Xt 
H
unit at the considered triplet of subcarriers as a matrix Xt ∈ max Dt,i w Ti xt  , (23a)
 
T

C3×(2Nt +1) , which is given as xt =[x1 ,x2 ,...,x6N +3 ] 
t i=1

H

x1 x4 x7 x10 · · · x6Nt −2 x6Nt +1
 subject to xt xt ≤ ε. (23b)
Xt =  x2 x5 x8 x11 · · · x6Nt −1 x6Nt +2  .
x3 x6 x9 x12 · · · x6Nt x6Nt +3 Regardless of the preamble power normalization, it can be
(21) easily checked that the optimal solution to (23) is given by
Among them, the Nt symbols with subscript indices of ni = Nt
X
6i − 1, i = 1, 2, . . . , Nt located at the central FT points are xt = ejφ Dt,i TH
i w, t = 1, 2, . . . , Nt , (24)
used for channel estimation, and other symbols are used as i=1

auxiliary pilots to enhance the pseudo-pilot power. Let xt =
T
[x1 , x2 , . . . , x6Nt +3 ] ∈ C6Nt +3 denote the preamble vector.
In order to calculate the pseudo-pilots at these central points,
we define sparse matrices Ti ∈ C9×(6Nt +3) , i = 1, 2, . . . , Nt
to extract these central pilots and their first-order FT neighbors
from Xt , which consist  of 1 and 0 merely. It can be readily
checked that Ti = 09×(6i−6) , I9 , 09×(6Nt −6i) . Following a
process similar to the previous subsection, the pseudo-pilots
where the phase term φ can also be arbitrarily chosen. In
Figure 4, we take the case of two transmit antennas as
an example and depict the optimal preamble structure on
each antenna. With this MIMO preamble, we can perform a
similar channel estimation process as the first MIMO extension
method.
It is worth noting that pilots on each triplet of subcarriers are
random and independent of other triplets. Besides, the second

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LIU et al.: PREAMBLE POWER OPTIMIZATION BASED ON INTRINSIC INTERFERENCE UTILIZATION FOR OQAM/FBMC CHANNEL ESTIMATION 7

TABLE III
C OMPARISON OF PSEUDO - PILOT POWER FOR DIFFERENT PREAMBLE DESIGN METHODS .

Typical values with different filters

Preamble design methods Theoretical expressions
EGF1 EGF2 EGF3/IOTA PHYDYAS
IAM-R 1+ 4β 2 1.11 1.42 1.78 1.23
IAM-C 1 + 4β + 4β 2 1.78 2.72 3.54 2.19
2
Duplicated preamble in [33] (1 + 2β + 2γ + 4ρ) /3 3.29 4.26 4.51 3.92
3 1 + 2β 2 + 2γ 2 + 4ρ2


Proposed 5.66 5.89 5.96 5.76

TABLE II
T HE MAIN PARAMETERS OF THE OQAM/FBMC SYSTEM .
101
IAM-R
IAM-C

Complementary Cumulative Distribution Function

Number of subcarriers 2048
100 Duplicated preamble
Subcarrier spacing 9.14 MHz Proposed
Modulation format 4-QAM
10-1

Prob{PAPR>abscissa}
Prototype Filters EGF / IOTA / PHYDYAS
Overlapping factor 4
10-2
Number of paths 6
Power profile (in dB) [-6, 0, -7, -22, -16, -20] 10-3
Delay profile (in µs) [-3, 0, 2, 4, 7, 11]
Maximum channel delay spread 129 10-4

Convolutional coding K = 7
Channel coding

with g1 = (133)o , g2 = (171)o
0 5 10 15 20 25 30
Frame length 20 complex OQAM/FBMC symbols Peak to Average Power Ratio (dB)

Fig. 5. Distribution of PAPR of OQAM/FBMC signals with different

MIMO extension method requires only 2Nt +1 OQAM/FBMC preambles.
symbols as preamble overhead, which is more spectrally
efficient than the first MIMO extension method.
its nearly isotropic support over the whole time-frequency
plane. In addition, we also choose α to be 1/3 and 3/2 for a
IV. S IMULATION RESULTS
more comprehensive comparison, which leads to the prototype
In this section, we evaluate the performance of different filters named EGF1 and EGF2, respectively.
preamble design methods through computer simulations. The
presented results reveal excellent performance of the proposed
A. Theoretical pseudo-pilot power
method in terms of channel estimation MSE, BER, and PAPR.
The main parameters of the OQAM/FBMC system are As mentioned earlier, from (7) the higher the pseudo-pilot
borrowed from the IEEE 802.22 standard [29], [46], which are power is, the better the channel estimation performance will
described in Table II. All preambles are normalized to ensure be. Accordingly, we carry out a theoretical comparison be-
equal average power at the transmitter for a fair comparison. tween different preamble design methods in terms of pseudo-
Besides, both extended Gaussian functions (EGFs) [47] and pilot power in the SISO case, which is summarized in Table III
PHYDYAS filters [48] with good time-frequency localization for different prototype filters. We conclude that the intrinsic in-
features are adopted for comparison. The approximate EGFs, terference weight changes with the prototype filter employed,
denoted zα,υ0 ,τ0 (t), are given by resulting in a difference in the pseudo-pilot power. Besides,
(∞  ) regardless of which filter is used, the proposed method with
1 X k k the optimal preamble always has the largest pseudo-pilot
zα,υ0 ,τ0 (t) = dk,α,υ0 Gα (t + ) + Gα (t − )
2 υ0 υ0 power and thus enable to obtain the best channel estimation
k=0
∞ performance, which will be verified in the following.
X t
× dl,1/α,τ0 cos(2πl ), (25)
τ0
l=0 B. PAPR property
where τ0 υ0 = 1/2, 0.528υ02
≤ α ≤ 7.568υ0 , and dk,α,υ0 Due to limited dynamic range of the transmit power ampli-
can be calculated according to the rules described in [47] fier in OQAM/FBMC systems, the training preamble should
2
with Gα (t) = (2α)1/4 e−παt denoting√the Gaussian function. be designed to have low PAPR to avoid nonlinear distortion of
When α = 1 and τ0 = υ0 = 1/ 2, the EGF is called the training signal. The complementary cumulative distribution
isotropic orthogonal transform algorithm (IOTA) filter due to function (CCDF) is used to characterize and evaluate the PAPR

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TABLE IV
m,n
T HE VALUES OF ζm+p 0 ,n+q0
FOR MULTI - ORDER FT NEIGHBORS WHEN EGF1 FILTER IS EMPLOYED .

m,n
ζm+p 0 ,n+q0
q0 = −3 q0 = −2 q0 = −1 q0 = 0 q0 = 1 q0 = 2 q0 = 3
p0 = −1 0.0716j 0.1043j 0.1471j 0.1668j 0.1471j 0.1043j 0.0716j
p0 = 0 −0.1519j 0 −0.6102j 1 0.6102j 0 0.1519j
p0 = 1 0.0716j −0.1043j 0.1471j −0.1668j 0.1471j −0.1043j 0.0716j

0 10 0
IAM-R IAM-R
IAM-C IAM-C
-5 Duplicated preamble 10 -1 Duplicated preamble
Proposed Proposed
Ideal
-10
10 -2

-15
10 -3
MSE (dB)

BER
-20
10 -4

-25
10 -5

-30
10 -6
-35

10 -7
0 4 8 12 16 20 24 0 2 4 6 8 10 12
SNR (dB) SNR (dB)

Fig. 6. MSE comparison for different preamble design methods, with the Fig. 7. BER comparison for different preamble design methods, with the
EGF1 filter. EGF1 filter.

C. Channel estimation in the SISO case

performance of different preamble design methods. In Figure
5, we plot the CCDF of the transmitted OQAM/FBMC signals
with different preambles, which demonstrates a considerably
better PAPR behavior of the proposed preamble. The phase
terms of different triplets in the proposed preamble are ran-
domly chosen to be 0 or π. It can be seen from Figure 5
that all curves basically coincide in the low instantaneous
PAPR regime, which represents the PAPR distribution of data
signals. As observed, the conventional IAM and duplicated
preambles exhibit a high probability of high instantaneous
PAPR. Their preamble structures are deterministic and peri-
odic, which leads to the superposition of preamble signals
with similar phases on different subcarriers. As a consequence,
memory-less nonlinear distortions due to high PAPR of the
preamble signals are introduced. Besides, the periodic nature
of the conventional preambles results in a sparsity of the
modulated preamble signal in the time domain [32]. Therefore,
the broken lines appear in the high instantaneous PAPR regime
of the corresponding CCDF curves. Moreover, it can be also
observed from Figure 5 that the proposed optimal preamble
enjoys the lowest PAPR property due to its partly random
nature, which may be significant for practical communication
systems involving high power amplifier.
Figures 6 and 7 present the channel estimation MSE and
BER performances of different preamble design methods with
the EGF1 filter, respectively. In this case, the intrinsic interfer-
m,n
ence weighs ζm+,n+q 0
(|p0 | ≤ 1, |q0 | ≤ 3) are listed in Table
IV for odd time index n. The quantities γ, β, and ρ in Section
III are assigned as 0.6102, 0.1668, and 0.1471, respectively.
The proposed optimal preamble is then constructed according
to the theoretical result in Section III-B. Moreover, we have
plotted the BER versus the signal to noise ratio (SNR) that
corresponds to the case of perfect channel estimation. It is
worth noting that there is non-negligible intrinsic interference
to the pilot from multi-order FT neighbors in practice, which
is also considered for a more accurate comparison.
As observed, the proposed method is superior to the conven-
tional IAM and duplicated preamble design methods in terms
of channel estimation MSE and BER performances. Seen from
Figure 6, the proposed method has approximately 10 dB and
4.5 dB MSE performance gain over the IAM-C and duplicated
preamble design methods at all SNR regimes, respectively. The
reason is that the optimized preamble contributes to the largest
pseudo-pilot power, thereby maximally suppressing the noise
effect and improving the channel estimation performance.
Besides, as shown in Figure 7, a comparable BER performance
between the proposed method and the ideal case is achieved.
The corresponding channel estimation MSE and BER per-

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LIU et al.: PREAMBLE POWER OPTIMIZATION BASED ON INTRINSIC INTERFERENCE UTILIZATION FOR OQAM/FBMC CHANNEL ESTIMATION 9

TABLE V
m,n
T HE VALUES OF ζm+p 0 ,n+q0
FOR MULTI - ORDER FT NEIGHBORS WHEN PHYDYAS FILTER IS EMPLOYED .

m,n
ζm+p 0 ,n+q0
q0 = −3 q0 = −2 q0 = −1 q0 = 0 q0 = 1 q0 = 2 q0 = 3
p0 = −1 0.0429j 0.125j 0.2058j 0.2393j 0.2058j 0.125j 0.0429j
p0 = 0 −0.0668j 0 −0.5644j 1 0.5644j 0 0.0668j
p0 = 1 0.0429j −0.125j 0.2058j −0.2393j 0.2058j −0.125j 0.0429j

0 10 0
IAM-R IAM-R
IAM-C IAM-C
-5 Duplicated preamble 10 -1 Duplicated preamble
Proposed Proposed
Ideal
-10
10 -2

-15
10 -3
MSE (dB)

BER
-20
10 -4

-25
10 -5

-30
10 -6
-35

10 -7
0 4 8 12 16 20 24 0 2 4 6 8 10 12
SNR (dB) SNR (dB)

Fig. 8. MSE comparison for different preamble design methods, with the Fig. 9. BER comparison for different preamble design methods, with the
PHYDYAS filter. PHYDYAS filter.

under a highly frequency-selective VehB channel specified by

formances with the PHYDYAS filter are plotted in Figures
8 and 9, respectively. In this case, the intrinsic interference
weights are determined as in Table V. Thus, the quantities
γ, β, and ρ in Section III are assigned as 0.5644, 0.2393,
and 0.2058, respectively. The proposed optimal preamble is
then constructed accordingly. The simulation results in Figures
8 and 9 clearly show the expected superior performance of
the proposed method over the conventional methods. Besides,
compared to the case of employing the EGF1 filter, the channel
estimation MSE performances of all preamble design methods
are improved due to a higher pseudo-pilot power boosting,
which is consistent with the theoretical results in Table III.
Similar performance improvements could also be achieved
for the case of employing other prototype filters, which are
omitted here due to space limitations.
As observed in Tables IV and V, there will be non-negligible
intrinsic interference from multi-order neighbors of a pilot
with the practical EGF and PHYDYAS prototype filters. In
the above simulations, this part of interference is ignored by
inserting sufficient zero guard symbols between data symbols
and pilots. However, the insertion of zero guard intervals
results in reduced spectral efficiency. Now, consider a more
spectrally efficient scenario in which the preamble is followed
immediately by data symbols in the frame without any addi-
tional zero guard intervals. In Figure 10, we show the channel
estimation performance of different preamble design methods
ITU [49]. Due to the intrinsic interference from unknown data
symbols and errors brought by the flat subchannel assumption
in (4), all methods exhibit error floors in weak noise regions.
Besides, the channel estimation performance of the duplicated
preamble design method and the proposed method is degraded
by errors in adjacent channel interpolation. Nevertheless, the
proposed method is still superior to the conventional methods
in all SNR regions.
It is worth mentioning that the training overhead of all the
above methods is the same and three OQAM/FBMC symbols
are required for channel estimation. Note that the symbol
interval of OQAM/FBMC is half that of CP-OFDM due to the
lattice staggering. Therefore, the preamble in OQAM/FBMC is
half a complex symbol longer than the preamble employed in
CP-OFDM. Time and energy efficient preamble design based
on the proposed optimization method is left as future work.
D. Channel estimation in the MIMO case
To verify the effectivity of the preamble design proposed
in Section III-C, we conduct simulations under 2 × 2 and
4 × 4 antenna configurations with the PHYDYAS filter to
demonstrate their channel estimation MSE performance, as
depicted in Figure 11 and Figure 12, respectively. As observed,
both the first MIMO extension method obtained directly from
its SISO counterpart (‘Proposed1’) and the second MIMO

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0 0
IAM-R IAM-R
IAM-C IAM-C
-5 Duplicated preamble
-5 Duplicated preamble
Proposed Proposed1
Proposed2
-10
-10
-15
MSE (dB)

MSE (dB)
-15
-20

-20 -25

-30
-25

-35
-30
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 0 4 8 12 16 20 24
SNR (dB) SNR (dB)

Fig. 10. MSE comparison for different preamble design methods under the Fig. 12. MSE comparison for different preamble design methods in a 4 × 4
ITU-VehB channel. MIMO-OQAM/FBMC system, with the PHYDYAS filter.

0 performance.
IAM-R
IAM-C
-5 Duplicated preamble V. CONCLUSIONS
Proposed1
Proposed2 In this paper, we investigated the design of an optimal
-10
preamble based on intrinsic interference utilization to achieve
-15
the minimum channel estimation MSE at the pilot subcarriers
in OQAM/FBMC systems. We built the preamble by triplets
MSE (dB)

-20
-25
-30
-35
0 4 8 12 16
SNR (dB)
Fig. 11. MSE comparison for different preamble design methods in a 2 × 2
MIMO-OQAM/FBMC system, with the PHYDYAS filter.
extension method obtained from the preamble optimization
(‘Proposed2’) achieve better channel estimation performance
than the conventional preamble design methods. Besides,
compared to the second MIMO extension method, the im-
proved performance of the first MIMO extension method with
increased preamble overhead can be naturally expected. Note
that the preamble overhead for both the first MIMO extension
method and the duplicated preamble design method is 3Nt
OQAM/FBMC symbols, while the preamble overhead for
both the second MIMO extension method and IAM variants
is 2Nt + 1 OQAM/FBMC symbols. Therefore, it can be
concluded that the proposed preamble design methods in
the MIMO case outperform conventional preamble design
methods in terms of spectral efficiency and channel estimation
of subcarriers, where the central FT point of each triplet
was used for channel estimation and the channels at the rest
of the subcarriers were then obtained via interpolation. The
preamble optimization problem was formulated to minimize
the channel estimation MSE subject to a preamble power
constraint at the transmitter. We found that the channel es-
timation MSE can be minimized when the preamble symbols
and the corresponding intrinsic interference weights exhibit
20 24 a linear dependence relationship. Besides, extensions to the
MIMO setup capable of improving both spectral efficiency and
channel estimation performance were analysed and developed.
Simulation results demonstrated that the proposed optimal
preamble design method offers remarkable improvements over
conventional methods in terms of channel estimation MSE
and BER performances. Besides, a much lower PAPR could
be achieved due to the partly random nature of the proposed
preamble.
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Transactions on Vehicular Technology
LIU et al.: PREAMBLE POWER OPTIMIZATION BASED ON INTRINSIC INTERFERENCE UTILIZATION FOR OQAM/FBMC CHANNEL ESTIMATION
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