Channel Estimation Techniques Based on Pilot Arrangement in OFDM Systems Sinem Coleri, Mustafa Ergen, Anuj Puri, and Ahmad Bahai AbstractThe channel estimation techniques for OFDM systems based on pilot arrangement are investigated. The channel estimation based on comb type pilot arrangement is studied through different algorithms for both estimating channel at pilot frequencies and interpolating the channel. The estimation of channel at pilot frequencies is based on LS and LMS while the channel interpolation is done using linear interpolation, second order interpolation, low-pass interpolation, spline cubic interpo- lation, and time domain interpolation. Time-domain interpolation is obtained by passing to time domain through IDFT (Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform), zero padding and going back to frequency domain through DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform). In addition, the channel estimation based on block type pilot arrangement is performed by sending pilots at every sub-channel and using this estimation for a specific number of following symbols. We have also implemented decision feedback equalizer for all sub-channels followed by periodic block-type pilots. We have compared the performances of all schemes by measuring bit error rate with 16QAM, QPSK, DQPSKand BPSKas modulation schemes, and multi-path Rayleigh fading and AR based fading channels as channel models. Index TermsCochannel interference, communication chan- nels, data communication, digital communication, frequency division multiplexing, frequency domain analysis, time domain analysis, time-varying channels. I. INTRODUCTION O RTHOGONAL Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has recently been applied widely in wireless communication systems due to its high data rate transmission capability with high bandwidth efficiency and its robustness to multi-path delay. It has been used in wireless LAN standards such as American IEEE802.11a and the European equivalent HIPERLAN/2 and in multimedia wireless services such as Japanese Multimedia Mobile Access Communications. A dynamic estimation of channel is necessary before the de- modulation of OFDM signals since the radio channel is fre- quency selective and time-varying for wideband mobile com- munication systems [1]. The channel estimation can be performed by either inserting pilot tones into all of the subcarriers of OFDM symbols with a specific period or inserting pilot tones into each OFDM symbol. The first one, block type pilot channel estimation, has been Manuscript received February 19, 2002; revised June 12, 2002. This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research and National Semiconductor. S. Coleri, M. Ergen, and A. Puri are with Electrical Engineering, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA (e-mail: {csinem; ergen; anuj}@ eecs.berkeley.edu). A. Bahai is with Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA (e-mail: [email protected]). Publisher Item Identifier 10.1109/TBC.2002.804034. developed under the assumption of slow fading channel. Even with decision feedback equalizer, this assumes that the channel transfer function is not changing very rapidly. The estimation of the channel for this block-type pilot arrangement can be based on Least Square (LS) or Minimum Mean-Square (MMSE). The MMSE estimate has been shown to give 1015 dB gain in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the same mean square error of channel estimation over LS estimate [2]. In [3], a low-rank ap- proximation is applied to linear MMSE by using the frequency correlation of the channel to eliminate the major drawback of MMSE, which is complexity. The later, the comb-type pilot channel estimation, has been introduced to satisfy the need for equalizing when the channel changes even in one OFDM block. The comb-type pilot channel estimation consists of algorithms to estimate the channel at pilot frequencies and to interpolate the channel. The estimation of the channel at the pilot frequencies for comb-type based channel estimation can be based on LS, MMSE or Least Mean-Square (LMS). MMSE has been shown to perform much better than LS. In [4], the complexity of MMSE is reduced by deriving an optimal low-rank estimator with singular-value decomposition. The interpolation of the channel for comb-type based channel estimation can depend on linear interpolation, second order in- terpolation, low-pass interpolation, spline cubic interpolation, and time domain interpolation. In [4], second-order interpola- tion has been shown to perform better than the linear interpola- tion. In [5], time-domain interpolation has been proven to give lower bit-error rate (BER) compared to linear interpolation. In this paper, our aim is to compare the performance of all of the above schemes by applying 16QAM (16 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation), QPSK (Quadrature Phase Shift Keying), DQPSK (Differential Quadrature Phase Shift Keying) and BPSK (Binary Phase Shift Keying) as modulation schemes with Rayleigh fading and AR (Auto-Regressive) based fading channels as channel models. In Section II, the description of the OFDM system based on pilot channel estimation is given. In Section III, the estimation of the channel based on block-type pilot arrangement is discussed. In Section IV, the estimation of the channel at pilot frequencies is presented. In Section V, the different interpolation techniques are introduced. In Section VI, the simulation environment and results are described. Section VII concludes the paper. II. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION The OFDMsystembased on pilot channel estimation is given in Fig. 1. The binary information is first grouped and mapped ac- 0018-9316/02$17.00 2002 IEEE 224 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 48, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2002 Fig. 1. Baseband OFDM system. cording to the modulation in signal mapper. After inserting pi- lots either to all sub-carriers with a specific period or uniformly between the information data sequence, IDFT block is used to transform the data sequence of length into time do- main signal with the following equation: (1) where is the DFT length. Following IDFT block, guard time, which is chosen to be larger than the expected delay spread, is inserted to prevent inter-symbol interference. This guard time includes the cyclically extended part of OFDM symbol in order to eliminate inter-carrier interference (ICI). The resultant OFDM symbol is given as follows: (2) where is the length of the guard interval. The transmitted signal will pass through the frequency selective time varying fading channel with additive noise. The received signal is given by: (3) where is Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) and is the channel impulse response. The channel response can be represented by [5]: (4) where is the total number of propagation paths, is the com- plex impulse response of the th path, is the th path Doppler frequency shift, is delay spread index, is the sample period and is the th path delay normalized by the sampling time. At the receiver, after passing to discrete domain through A/D and low pass filter, guard time is removed: for (5) Then is sent to DFT block for the following operation: (6) Assuming there is no ISI, [8] shows the relation of the resulting to , that is ICI because of Doppler frequency and , with the fol- lowing equation [4]: (7) where Following DFT block, the pilot signals are extracted and the es- timated channel for the data sub-channels is obtained in channel estimation block. Then the transmitted data is estimated by: (8) Then the binary information data is obtained back in signal demapper block. III. CHANNEL ESTIMATION BASED ON BLOCK-TYPE PILOT ARRANGEMENT In block-type pilot based channel estimation, OFDM channel estimation symbols are transmitted periodically, in which all sub-carriers are used as pilots. If the channel is constant during the block, there will be no channel estimation error since the pi- lots are sent at all carriers. The estimation can be performed by using either LS or MMSE [2], [3]. If inter symbol interference is eliminated by the guard in- terval, we write (7) in matrix notation (9) where . . . . . . . . . (10) If the time domain channel vector is Gaussian and uncorre- lated with the channel noise , the frequency domain MMSE estimate of is given by [3]: (11) COLERI et al.: CHANNEL ESTIMATION TECHNIQUES BASED ON PILOT ARRANGEMENT IN OFDM SYSTEMS 225 where (12) are the cross covariance matrix between and and the auto- covariance matrix of . is the auto-covariance matrix of and represents the noise variance . The LS estimate is represented by: (13) which minimizes . When the channel is slow fading, the channel estimation in- side the block can be updated using the decision feedback equal- izer at each sub-carrier. Decision feedback equalizer for the th sub-carrier can be described as follows: The channel response at the th sub-carrier estimated from the previous symbol is used to find the estimated trans- mitted signal (14) is mapped to the binary data through signal demapper and then obtained back through signal mapper as . The estimated channel is updated by: (15) Since the decision feedback equalizer has to assume that the decisions are correct, the fast fading channel will cause the complete loss of estimated channel parameters. Therefore, as the channel fading becomes faster, there happens to be a com- promise between the estimation error due to the interpolation and the error due to loss of channel tracking. For fast fading channels, as will be shown in simulations, the comb-type based channel estimation performs much better. IV. CHANNEL ESTIMATION AT PILOT FREQUENCIES IN COMB-TYPE PILOT ARRANGEMENT In comb-type pilot based channel estimation, the pilot sig- nals are uniformly inserted into according to the following equation: (16) where number of carriers and is the th pilot carrier value. We define as the fre- quency response of the channel at pilot sub-carriers. The esti- mate of the channel at pilot sub-carriers based on LS estimation is given by: (17) where and are output and input at the th pilot sub-carrier respectively. Since LS estimate is susceptible to noise and ICI, MMSE is proposed while compromising complexity. Since MMSE includes the matrix inversion at each iteration, the simplified linear MMSE estimator is suggested in [6]. In this simplified version, the inverse is only need to be calculated once. In [4], the complexity is further reduced with a low-rank approxima- tion by using singular value decomposition. Fig. 2. Pilot arrangement. V. INTERPOLATION TECHNIQUES IN COMB-TYPE PILOT ARRANGEMENT In comb-type pilot based channel estimation, an efficient in- terpolation technique is necessary in order to estimate channel at data sub-carriers by using the channel information at pilot sub-carriers. The linear interpolation method is shown to perform better than the piecewise-constant interpolation in [7]. The channel estimation at the data-carrier , , using linear interpolation is given by: (18) The second-order interpolation is shown to fit better than linear interpolation [4]. The channel estimated by second-order inter- polation is given by: where (19) The low-pass interpolation is performed by inserting zeros into the original sequence and then applying a lowpass FIR filter (interp function in MATLAB) that allows the original data to pass through unchanged and interpolates between such that the mean-square error between the interpolated points and their ideal values is minimized. The spline cubic 226 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 48, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2002 TABLE I SIMULATION PARAMETERS interpolation (spline function in MATLAB) produces a smooth and continuous polynomial fitted to given data points. The time domain interpolation is a high-resolution interpolation based on zero-padding and DFT/IDFT [8]. After obtaining the estimated channel , we first convert it to time domain by IDFT: (20) Then, by using the basic multi-rate signal processing properties [9], the signal is interpolated by transforming the points into points with the following method: (21) The estimate of the channel at all frequencies is obtained by: (22) VI. SIMULATION A. Description of Simulation 1) System Parameters: OFDM system parameters used in the simulation are indicated in Table I: We assume to have perfect synchronization since the aim is to observe channel estimation performance. Moreover, we have chosen the guard interval to be greater than the maximum delay spread in order to avoid inter-symbol interference. Simulations are carried out for different signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios and for different Doppler spreads. 2) Channel Model: Two multi-path fading channel models are used in the simulations. The 1st channel model is the ATTC (Advanced Television Technology Center) and the Grande Al- liance DTV laboratorys ensemble E model, whose static case impulse response is given by: (23) The 2nd channel model is the simplified version of DVB-T channel model, whose static impulse response is given in Table II. In the simulation, we have used Rayleigh fading TABLE II CHANNEL IMPULSE RESPONSE FOR CHANNEL 2 Fig. 3. Time domain interpolation. Fig. 4. LMS scheme. channel. In order to see the effect of fading on block type based and LMS based channel estimation, we have also mod- eled channel that is time-varying according to the following autoregressive (AR) model: (24) where is the fading factor and is AWGN noise vector. is chosen to be close to 1 in order to satisfy the assumption that channel impulse response does not change within one OFDM symbol duration. In the simulations, changes from 0.90 to 1. 3) Channel Estimation Based on Block-Type Pilot Arrange- ment: We have modeled two types of block-type pilot based channel estimation. Each block consists of a fixed number of symbols, which is 30 in the simulation. Pilots are sent in all the sub-carriers of the first symbol of each block and channel esti- mation is performed by using LS estimation. According to the first model, the channel estimated at the beginning of the block is used for all the following symbols of the block and according to the second method, the decision feedback equalizer, which is described in Section III, is used for the following symbols in order to track the channel. 4) Channel Estimation Based on Comb-Type Pilot Arrange- ment: We have used both LS and LMS to estimate the channel at pilot frequencies. The LS estimator description is given in Section III. The LMS estimator uses one tap LMS adaptive filter at each pilot frequency. The first value is found directly through LS and the following values are calculated based on the previous estimation and the current channel output as shown in Fig. 4. COLERI et al.: CHANNEL ESTIMATION TECHNIQUES BASED ON PILOT ARRANGEMENT IN OFDM SYSTEMS 227 Fig. 5. BPSK modulation with Rayleigh fading (channel 1, Doppler freq. 70 Hz). Fig. 6. QPSK modulation with Rayleigh fading (channel 1, Doppler freq. 70 Hz). The channel estimation at pilot frequencies is performed by using either LS or LMS. Then all of the possible interpola- tion techniques (linear interpolation, second order interpolation, low-pass interpolation, spline cubic interpolation, and time do- main interpolation) are applied to LS estimation result to inves- tigate the interpolation effects and linear interpolation is applied to LMS estimation results to compare with the LS overall esti- mation results. B. Simulation Results The legends linear, second-order, low-pass, spline, time do- main denote interpolation schemes of comb-type channel es- timation with the LS estimate at the pilot frequencies, block type shows the block type pilot arrangement with LS estimate at the pilot frequencies and without adjustment, decision feed- back means the block type pilot arrangement with LS estimate at the pilot frequencies and with decision feedback, and LMS Fig. 7. 16QAM modulation with Rayleigh fading (channel 1, Doppler freq. 70 Hz). Fig. 8. DQPSK modulation with Rayleigh fading (channel 1, Doppler freq. 70 Hz). is for the linear interpolation scheme for comb-type channel es- timation with LMS estimate at the pilot frequencies. Figs. 58 give the BER performance of channel estimation algorithms for different modulations and for Rayleigh fading channel, with static channel response given in (23), Doppler fre- quency 70 Hz and OFDM parameters given in Table I. These re- sults show that the block-type estimation and decision feedback BER is 1015 dB higher than that of the comb-type estimation type. This is because the channel transfer function changes so fast that there are even changes for adjacent OFDM symbols. The comb-type channel estimation with low pass interpola- tion achieves the best performance among all the estimation techniques for BPSK, QPSK, and 16QAMmodulation. The per- formance among comb-type channel estimation techniques usu- ally ranges from the best to the worst as follows: low-pass, spline, time-domain, second-order and linear. The result was ex- pected since the low-pass interpolation used in simulation does the interpolation such that the mean-square error between the 228 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 48, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2002 Fig. 9. 16QAM modulation with AR fading (channel 1). Fig. 10. 16QAM modulation with Rayleigh fading (channel 2, Doppler freq. 70 Hz). interpolated points and their ideal values is minimized. These results are also consistent with those obtained in [4] and [5]. DQPSK modulation based channel estimation shows almost the same performance for all channel estimation techniques ex- cept the decision-feedback method. This is expected because di- viding two consecutive data sub-carriers in signal de-mapper eliminates the time varying fading channel effect. The error in estimation techniques result from the additive white noise. The BER performance of DQPSK for all estimation types is much better than those with modulations QPSK and 16QAM and worse than those with the BPSK modulation for high SNR. The effect of fading on the block type and LMS estimation can be observed from Fig. 9 for autoregressive channel model with different fading parameters. As the fading factor in (24) increases from 0.9 to 0.999, the performance of both block based methods and LMS improves. When fading is fast, this means higher fading parameter, the estimation does not improve as SNR increases. The reason for this is that the Fig. 11. 16QAM modulation with Rayleigh fading (channel 1, SNR 40 dB). tracking error in fast fading channel avoids improving the performance. On the other hand, for slow fading channel, the BER of the decision feedback block-type channel estimation tracks the channel much better compared to the other two schemes as SNR increases. The general characteristics of the channel estimation tech- niques perform the same as Fig. 7 for Rayleigh fading channel, whose static impulse response is given in Table II for 16QAM as can be seen in Fig. 10. Fig. 11 shows the performance of channel estimation methods for 16QAM modulation, Rayleigh fading channel whose static response is given in (23) and 40 dB SNR for different Doppler frequencies. The general behavior of the plots is that BER in- creases as the Doppler spread increases. The reason is the exis- tence of severe ICI caused by Doppler shifts. Another observa- tion from this plot is that decision feedback block type channel estimation performs better than comb-type based channel esti- mation for low Doppler frequencies as suggested in [11] except low-pass and spline interpolation. We also observe that time-do- main interpolation performance improves compared to other in- terpolation techniques as Doppler frequency increases. VII. CONCLUSION In this paper, a full review of block-type and comb-type pilot based channel estimation is given. Channel estimation based on block-type pilot arrangement with or without decision feedback equalizer is described. Channel estimation based on comb-type pilot arrangement is presented by giving the channel estimation methods at the pilot frequencies and the interpolation of the channel at data frequencies. The simulation results show that comb-type pilot based channel estimation with low-pass inter- polation performs the best among all channel estimation algo- rithms. This was expected since the comb-type pilot arrange- ment allows the tracking of fast fading channel and low-pass interpolation does the interpolation such that the mean-square error between the interpolated points and their ideal values is minimized. In addition, for lowDoppler frequencies, the perfor- mance of decision feedback estimation is observed to be slightly COLERI et al.: CHANNEL ESTIMATION TECHNIQUES BASED ON PILOT ARRANGEMENT IN OFDM SYSTEMS 229 worse than that of the best estimation. Therefore, some perfor- mance degradation can be tolerated for higher data bit rate for low Doppler spread channels although low-pass interpolation comb-type channel estimation is more robust for Doppler fre- quency increase. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors are grateful to Prof. P. Varaiya for his help. REFERENCES [1] A. R. S. Bahai and B. R. Saltzberg, Multi-Carrier Digital Communica- tions: Theory and Applications of OFDM: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 1999. [2] J.-J. van de Beek, O. Edfors, M. Sandell, S. K. Wilson, and P. O. Bor- jesson, On channel estimation in OFDM systems, in Proc. IEEE 45th Vehicular Technology Conf., Chicago, IL, Jul. 1995, pp. 815819. [3] O. Edfors, M. Sandell, J.-J. van de Beek, S. K. Wilson, and P. O. Br- jesson, OFDM channel estimation by singular value decomposition, IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 46, no. 7, pp. 931939, Jul. 1998. [4] M. Hsieh and C. Wei, Channel estimation for OFDM systems based on comb-type pilot arrangement in frequency selective fading channels, IEEE Trans. Consumer Electron., vol. 44, no. 1, Feb. 1998. [5] R. Steele, Mobile Radio Communications. London, England: Pentech Press Limited, 1992. [6] U. Reimers, Digital video broadcasting, IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 36, no. 6, pp. 104110, June 1998. [7] L. J. Cimini, Analysis and simulation of a digital mobile channel using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 33, no. 7, pp. 665675, Jul. 1985. [8] Y. Zhao and A. Huang, A novel channel estimation method for OFDM Mobile Communications Systems based on pilot signals and transform domain processing, in Proc. IEEE 47th Vehicular Technology Conf., Phoenix, USA, May 1997, pp. 20892093. [9] A. V. Oppenheim and R. W. Schafer, Discrete-Time Signal Processing, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1999. [10] Digital video broadcasting (DVB): Framing, channel coding and mod- ulation for digital terrestrial television,, Draft ETSI EN300 744 V1.3.1 (2000-08). [11] Y. Li, Pilot-symbol-aided channel estimation for OFDM in wireless systems, IEEE Trans. Vehicular Technol., vol. 49, no. 4, Jul. 2000. Sinem Coleri is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley. She received her B.S. from Bilkent University in June 2000. Her research interests include com- munication theory, adhoc networks, and mobile IP. Mustafa Ergen is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley. He received his M.S. degree from University of California Berkeley in May 2002 and his B.S. degree from Middle East Technical University as a METU Valedictorian in June 2000. His research interests are in wireless networks and communication theory. Anuj Puri received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in December 1995. He was with Bell Labs of Lucent Technologies until December 1998. Since then he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. His interests are in wireless networks and embedded systems. Ahmad Bahai received his M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Impe- rial College, University of London in 1988 and his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from University of California at Berkeley in 1993. From 1992 to 1994 he worked as a member of technical staff in the wireless communications division of TCSI. He joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1994 where he was Technical Manager of Wireless Communication Group in Advanced Commu- nications Technology Labs until 1997. He has been involved in design of PDC, IS-95, GSM, and IS-136 terminals and base stations, as well as ADSL and Cable modems. He is one of the inventors of Multi-carrier CDMA (OFDM) concept and proposed the technology for the third generation wireless systems. He was the co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of ALGOREX Inc. and currently is the Chief Technology Officer of National Semiconductor, wireless division. He is an adjunct/consulting professor at Stanford University and UC Berkeley. His research interests include adaptive signal processing and communication theory. He is the author of more than 30 papers and reports and his book on Multi-Car- rier Digital Communications is published by Kluwer/Plenum. Dr. Bahai holds five patents in the Communications and Signal Processing field and currently serves as an editor of IEEE Communication Letters.