398 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 49, NO.

4, DECEMBER 2003

Pilot-Symbol Aided Channel Estimation for OFDM With Fast Fading Channels
Won-Gyu Song and Jong-Tae Lim

Abstract—In this paper, we address the problem of estimating a aim, in this paper, is to propose the estimation scheme that is
rapidly-varying channel in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multi- robust to fast-fading channel and to develop the interpolation
plexing (OFDM) systems. To handle rapid variation within a trans- scheme based on the simple Doppler frequency estimator.
mission block, we propose a novel pilot-based estimation scheme
which uses channel interpolation. In addition, we develop a simple
Doppler frequency estimation scheme. We show that the proposed II. SYSTEM MODEL
scheme has better performance in the high-Doppler frequency by
simulations. We consider an OFDM system with subcarriers. Trans-
mitted symbols denoted as and received symbols
Index Terms—Communication channels, mobile communica-
tion, OFDM. denoted as . We assume a time-varying mobile radio
channel with the impulse response (
where is the maximum delay) and the additive noise .
I. INTRODUCTION If the channel impulse response varies negligbly within
one symbol period, the input-output relation of the overall
R ECENTLY, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
(OFDM) has been studied widely in wireless communi-
cations since it has high transmission capability and it is robust
OFDM system can then be shown as
(1)
to multi-path delay. Since the radio channel is frequency selec-
tive and time-varying for wideband mobile communication sys- with the channel coefficients
tems, a dynamic estimation of channel is necessary [1], [2]. The
channel estimation can be performed by inserting pilot tones (2)
into each OFDM symbol and it consists of algorithms to es-
timate the channel at pilot frequencies and to interpolate the
However, we have made no assumptions about the underlying
channel. Often, an estimate of the multiplicative channel re-
channel structure. Over a time block of N symbol duration, the
sponse at pilot locations is obtained by either the least square
overall system can be expressed in matrix notation as
or the linear minimum mean-squared error method. Those esti-
mated channel responses at pilot locations are used to estimate (3)
the channel responses at data locations by linear or polynomial
interpolation. where is the transmitted data vector,
OFDM is sensitive to Doppler and carrier frequency errors, is the received data vector, is
which destroy the subcarrier orthogonality and result in inter- the Guassian noise vector and is the system ma-
channel interference (ICI). When the OFDM block duration is trix. Let be the standard N-dimensional DFT ma-
much smaller than the channel coherence time, i.e., relatively trix, be the channel matrix for the time-varying
mild Doppler, the channel can be assumed to be approximately ICI channel, and , be the transmitted signal and the received
constant over an OFDM block, and its estimation has been thor- signal, respectively. The DFT matrix is defined by
oughly studied in [3], [4]. However, the assumption on block and the channel matrix is defined
by
time-invariance may not be valid with high Doppler or distur-
bance such as synchronization errors [7]. In [11], [12], ICI term
are taken into consideration. However, [11] requires the char-
acteristics of the channel and [12] use pilot block so that has
difficult to estimate uniformly on all subcarriers. (4)
Our estimation scheme is based on the general pilot-assisted Then, , , and where is the
channel estimation scheme. Many analysis models of pilot-as- complex conjugate transpose of . Thus, and
sisted channel estimation assume a single-tap equalizer, i.e., the
-th received symbol is dependent on only the -th transmitted (5)
symbol [2]–[6]. However, the proposed scheme considers the
ICI term due to Doppler spread or carrier frequency errors. Our
where . Moreover,
Manuscript received January 9, 2003; revised September 2, 2003. This work
was supported by HWRS-ERC (sponsored by KOSEF). (6)
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Com-
puter Science, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 373-1
Guseong-dong Yuseong-gu Daejeon, 305-701, Korea (jtlim@stcon.kaist.ac.kr).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TBC.2003.819049 and the ICI term is .

0018-9316/03$17.00 © 2003 IEEE

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 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 49, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2003 399

III. CHANNEL ESTIMATION be the estimated . Then, we can form the system of
In this section, we address the problem of channel estimation linear equations
in an OFDM system with severe Doppler. To estimate channel
conveniently, we change the equation to the form .. .. ..
of . A channel vector is defined by . . . (12)

or
(7)
(13)
The -th received symbol is expressed as follows: To obtain as the least squares solution of the aforementioned
system, the number of rows of is larger than the number of
columns of . However, is matrix and .
To reduce the number of parameters needed for channel es-
timation, we make the reasonable assumption that some of the
channels can be obtained by linear interpolation. Let us consider
channels . Then we assume that
can be expressed as
(8)
(14)

Then we define as follows: Note that we have used the same weight vector for all
of the channel taps of : using the same weight vector is a
direct consequence of the assumption that
(9) are i.i.d processes for every . However, there is a correlation
between and for . We consider
matrix defined as
where and .
Assuming that there are pilot tones, which are placed at (15)
subcarriers , we know only .
Thus, is split in two matrices as follows: where is the -th block of , is the -th el-
ement of and is the identity matrix of dimension .
Then, under our assumption, we conclude that where
and we need to estimate param-
eters.
Let . Since , we obtain as the least
where is the set of pilot tones. Thus, we obtain squares solution of the aforementioned system,

(10) (16)

where and with is the pseudoinverse of where and

. Since we do not know for .
, has unknown elements.
B. Simplified Estimation Scheme
A. Proposed Channel Estimation Scheme Since the proposed estimation scheme has two estimation
steps and large size matrix inversion, it is much complex. Thus,
The proposed method has two steps. First, using the existing
we propose a simplified scheme to reduce the complexity. Note
channel estimation scheme [3], we can estimate . The esti-
that the low complexity of the simplified scheme results from
mate of the channel at pilot subcarriers based on the LS estima-
the performance loss.
tion is given by
We can reduce the size of the matrix and form the
linear equations above. However, the linear equations are
(11) sufficient to estimate the channel. That is, if , we can
form the system of linear equations
and for is obtained by some interpolation technique.
Then we estimate the channel at data subcarriers and what data .. .. ..
symbols are. The obtained by this algorithm is denoted by . . . .
Second, we use the obtained to estimate which includes
the ICI term. That is, in this step, is given by (5). Let (17)

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 400 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 49, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2003

or where is the difference in the OFDM symbol number. We

search for the first negative value of and let that be
(18) . Then, we determine the first zero crossing point of by
linear interpolation as follows:
Then, the estimated channel is

(19) (25)

Moreover, we can eliminate the first step of the proposed The correlation is estimated as follows:
scheme. When we assume that the transmitted data is the
i.i.d. process and the generation rate of each symbol is same, the (26)
expectation and the mean of each element of
is zero. Thus, we replace with . In addition, forming the
system of linear equations, the model becomes The first zero crossing point of the Bessel function is
. That is, becomes 0 at first when
. Thus, using the estimated zero crossing point, we find the
.. .. .. Doppler frequency:
. . .
(27)
(20)
or

(21) D. Placement of Pilot Tones

In frequency-selective time-invariant channels, placing the
Then, the estimated channel is
pilot tones equispaced on the FFT grid is the optimal scheme
[8]. The optimal scheme is valid in the proposed scheme because
(22) we have to estimate . However, in the simplified scheme
in which we assume that , the placement of pilot
tones becomes a different problem. We can show easily that
C. Interpolation Scheme becomes a singular matrix when it is a square matrix.
Without imposing any assumptions on the underlying Moreover, the estimation error by the least square, i.e.,
channel variations, linear interpolation appears to be the sim- is maximized when the pilots are
plest method for choosing the weight vector [2]. However, equispaced. That is, in some cases, the equispaced pilot tones
if a priori knowledge about the underlying channel model is can not be the best solution. On the other hand, the mean square
available, more sophisticated channel interpolation schemes error MSE of the LS method with the noise term is expressed as
can be devised.
Let us suppose that the channels follow the Jakes model (28)
[3]: , with de-
noting the Doppler frequency and being the symbol period. where represents the trace operation. The variance of ,
Then, the calculation of the interpolation weights is straight- , is decided by the placement of pilot tones. We will discuss
forward. For example, if we fix rows , more on the pilot placement problem in the next section.
the set of weights ,
which minimizes the error , with IV. SIMULATION
, can be obtained
using the orthogonality principle In this section, we demonstrate the performance of the
proposed channel estimation scheme. To construct an OFDM
signal, assmue the entire channel bandwidth, 800 kHz, is
(23)
divided into 128 tones. The four tones on each end are used as
guard tones, and the rest are used to transmit data. To make the
where and . tones orthogonal to each other, the symbol duration is 160 .
For choosing interpolation coefficients, an estimation of the An additional 40 guard interval is used to provide protection
Doppler frequency to mobile users is necessary. However, there from intersymbol interference due to channel multipath delay
is no simple method to estimate the Doppler frequency. There- spread. This results in a total block length and
fore, we propose a simple method for Doppler frequency estima- a subchannel symbol rate . Moreover, the
tion. The proposed method is based on the fact that the correla- QPSK modulation with coherent demodulation is used. Pilot
tion function of pilot symbols in the time direction is expressed symbols are inserted equispaced in the system at 10% rate.
by an Bessel function [9], i.e., In our simulations, we consider channels with the typical
urban delay profiles, with and
(24) .

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 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 49, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2003
Fig. 1. BER performance for SNR based on various channel estimation
schemes (40 Hz Doppler).
Fig. 2. BER performance for SNR based on various channel estimation
schemes (200 Hz Doppler).
Figs. 1 and 2 show the bit error rate (BER) performance of
channel estimation schemes. The proposed scheme, the simpli-
fied scheme 1 and the simplified scheme 2 are based on (16),
(19) and (22), respectively. We know that the proposed scheme
has the best BER performance and the simplified schemes have
better performance than the least square estimation. In Fig. 3,
we show the BER performance of estimation schemes for the
Doppler frequency. Since it uses the result of the least square
estimation, it is sensitive to the Doppler frequency. The simpli-
fied schemes is fairly robust to the Doppler frequency. However,
for all Doppler frequency range, the proposed scheme has the
lowest error rate.
Fig. 4 shows the BER performance for the interpolation
schemes. We simulate the proposed scheme with linear in-
terpolation and the interpolation based on the Jakes model
for and
Doppler frequency, respectively. For 40 Hz Doppler, two
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401
Fig. 3. BER performance for Doppler frequency based on various channel
estimation schemes.
Fig. 4. BER performance based on various interpolation scheme and Doppler
frequency.
interpolation schemes show similar performance. However, the
interpolation based on the Jakes model has better performance
than the linear interpolation in 200 Hz. In result, the Jakes
model interpolation is suitable for the environment with the
high Doppler frequency.
In Figs. 5 and 6, we simulate the performance for the pilot
placement schemes. We consider three pilot sets. The first pilot
set means the equispaced pilot tones and the third set means the
pilots placed grouped together. The second one is the set of pi-
lots grouped together, but in more than one group. These pilot
sets are described in Table I. The numbers of pilot place represent
the tones used for pilots. Fig. 5 shows the result of the proposed
scheme. As we expect, the estimation with pilot set 1 results in the
best performance. In Fig. 6, the result of the simplified scheme 2
turns out to be same with the result shown in Fig. 5. However,
the performance difference of schemes in Fig. 6 is smaller than
that in Fig. 5 due to the least square error, .
 402 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 49, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2003

V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we propose the pilot-based estimation scheme
on a rapidly-varying channel in OFDM systems. We use
channel interpolation to handle rapid variation within a trans-
mission block. Coupled with the proposed channel estimation
scheme, we have proposed a simple Doppler frequency estima-
tion scheme. Using the scheme, we find interpolation weights
in the Jakes model. By simulations of the proposed scheme,
we show that our scheme has good performance in the high
Doppler frequency.

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