Direct Time-Domain Channel Impulse Response Estimation for OFDM-Based Systems

ABSTRACTWhile inter-symbol interference is not of concern, inter-carrier interference that is caused by carrier frequency offset (CFO) is more concerned in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The estimation of channel impulse response (CIR) is another important parameter of interest in the system. Recently, a number of approaches for the joint estimation of CFO and CIR in OFDM systems have been proposed in the literature, and most of them are traditional maximum-likelihood-based approaches. In this paper, we propose a number of mixture cost-reference particle filtering (CRPF) approaches for joint estimation of CIR and CFO, and a couple of them can be applied without the knowledge of both state and measurement noise statistics. Conventional least mean squares algorithm or recursive least squares algorithm is jointly employed with recently developed CRPF for nonlinear and multiple parameters estimation in OFDM systems. The computer simulation results show that mixture CRPFs are more robust against particle impoverishment (PI) problem than standard mixture particle filtering (PF) and mixture regularized PF (RPF) approaches although RPF was particularly developed to tackle the PI problem. In this paper, we investigate a number of mixture PF approaches including ones that do not need the information of noise statistics for the joint estimation of CFO and channel in OFDM systems.

Under highly mobile environments, the bit error rate (BER) performance of DFT spreading-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DFTS-OFDM) signal with a frequency domain equalization method would be degraded relatively due to the loss of orthogonality among subcarriers. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an iterative based time domain equalization (TDE) technique with a time domain channel impulse response (CIR) estimation method for the DFTS-OFDM signal. The salient features of proposed method are to employ a time domain training sequence (TS) in the estimation of CIR instead of using the conventional pilot subcarriers method and to employ the TDE technique with a maximum likelihood (ML) estimation method instead of using the conventional minimum mean square error frequency domain equalization (MMSE-FDE) method. This paper also proposes a low-complexity iterative method for the TDE method by using the preconditioned conjugate gradient squared (PCGS) algorithm for solving the simultaneous equations instead of using a direct calculation of inverse matrix. This paper presents various simulation results under highly mobile environments to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed iterative based TDE with the CIR estimation method for the DFTS-OFDM signal as comparing with the conventional MMSE-FDE method.

We introduce a new structured channel impulse response (CIR) estimation method for sparse multipath channels where we demonstrate a robust way of restoring the pulse shape into the composite CIR. We call this novel CIR estimation method time-of-arrival based blended least squares (TOA-BLS) which uses symbol rate sampled signals, and it is based on blending correlation processing followed by TOA estimation in the frequency domain by the least squares based channel estimation. TOA estimation in the frequency domain is accomplished by estimating the AR model parameters by solving the forward and forward-backward linear prediction equations in the least squares sense. Simulation examples are drawn from the ATSC digital TV 8-VSB system (ATSC Digital Television Standard, A/53, 1995). The delay spread for digital TV systems can be as long as several hundred times the symbol duration; however, digital TV channels are sparse where there are only a few dominant multipaths.

A novel efficient algorithm for the estimation of sparse channel impulse response (CIR) is addressed for OFDM systems. The innovation of this algorithm comes from the fact that it equivalently sees the CIR estimation problem as a decoding one. To do so, it exploits first the channel sparsity through the modelling of the sparse CIR as a Bernoulli-Gaussian process. Then, using the relationship between the Reed-Solomon codes and the OFDM modulator it efficiently estimates the sparse CIR using directly the decoding of the OFDM received signal. The obtained simulation results highlight that using the proposed algorithm gives good estimation performance in terms of mean squares error on the sparse CIR estimates.

Accurate channel estimation is essential for achieving the performance gains offered by reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided wireless communications. A variety of channel estimation methods have been proposed for such systems; however, none of the existing methods takes into account the effect of synchronization errors such as carrier frequency offset (CFO). In general, CFO can significantly degrade the channel estimation performance of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Motivated by this, we investigate the effect of CFO on channel estimation for RIS-aided OFDM systems. Furthermore, we propose a joint CFO and channel impulse response (CIR) estimation method for these systems. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, and also demonstrate that the use of time-domain rather than frequency-domain estimation in this context results in an improvement in the mean-squared error (MSE) performance of channel estimation as well as in a significantly lower overall computational complexity.

This paper addresses the effective sparse channel estimation based on the most significant taps (MST) selection with high spectral efficiency and moderate computational complexity for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The main goal of this paper is to obtain an efficient time domain threshold and achieve the channel estimation performance approaching the least squares (LS) method with exact sparsity (exact number of non-zero channel taps) without using prior knowledge of both channel statistics and noise standard deviation. Firstly, classical LS method is used to get an initial channel impulse response (CIR) estimate. Then a novel effective threshold, estimated from the noise coefficients of the initial estimated CIR, is proposed. Finally, the obtained threshold is used to select the most significant taps. Simulations show that the proposed method is able to achieve good channel estimation performances for sparse channel within a comparatively wide range of sparsity with small number of pilots and moderate computational complexity.

SSP based underwater CIR estimation with S-BiFPN

A channel‐estimate‐based frequency‐domain equalization (CE‐FDE) scheme for wireless broadband single‐carrier communications over time‐varying frequency‐selective fading channels is proposed. Adaptive updating of the FDE coefficients are based on the timely estimate of channel impulse response (CIR) to avoid error propagation that is a major source of performance degradation in adaptive equalizers using least mean square (LMS) or recursive least square (RLS) algorithms. Various time‐domain and frequency‐domain techniques for initial channel estimation and adaptive updating are discussed and evaluated in terms of performance and complexity. Performance of uncoded and coded systems using the proposed CE‐FDE with diversity combining in different time‐varying, multi‐path fading channels is evaluated. Analytical and simulation results show the good performance of the proposed scheme suitable for broadband wireless communications. For channels with high‐Doppler frequency, diversity combining substantially improves the system performance. For channels with sparse multi‐path propagation, a tap‐selection strategy used with the CE‐FDE systems can significantly reduce the complexity without sacrificing the performance. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this paper, a new joint timing and channel estimation scheme is proposed for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing and single carrier block transmission ultra-wideband (UWB) systems. In particular, a new preamble pattern is used for both coarse timing and channel estimation. Despite of the presence of coarse timing error, the estimated channel impulse response (CIR) is simply the cyclic shifted version of the real CIR, thanks to the unique structure of the preamble. Then a new method is proposed to search for the first channel tap in the CIR vector, which can be employed to fine tune the timing position and adjust the channel estimation for later data block detection. The proposed scheme has low complexity, saves preamble overhead by performing joint synchronization and channel estimation, and outperforms existing timing acquisition methods in the literature by a large margin in dense multipath UWB channels. Moreover, this paper presents an analysis of the effect of residual timing error on the performance of single carrier systems with frequency domain equalization.

A pilot-aided scheme is proposed for the joint estimation and tracking of channel impulse response (CIR), carrier frequency offset (CFO) and sampling frequency offset (SFO) in burst mode, multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO), and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing(OFDM) systems. First, a received signal model that takes into account nonlinear CFO/SFO effects is formulated. Then, based on the derived signal model and the received multicarrier signal samples containing the pilot tones in the frequency domain, an objective function that includes MIMO CIR, CFO, and SFO is introduced to develop a vector recursive-least-square (RLS)-based joint channel estimation and synchronization algorithm. The analysis and simulation results show that, over the large ranges of the CFO and SFO values, the proposed estimation and tracking scheme offers fast convergence, high stability, and a near-optimum receiver performance that is remarkably close to the ideal performance in the case of perfect channel estimation and synchronization over quasi-static Rayleigh multipath fading channels.

In highly time-varying fading channel, the Discrete Fourier Transform Spreading Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (DFTS-OFDM) signal would be damaged significantly by the inter-channel interference (ICI) due to the loss of orthogonality among subcarriers which leads a fatal degradation of bit error rate (BER) performance. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a time domain equalization (TDE) technique in conjunction with a time domain channel impulse response (CIR) estimation method for the DFTS-OFDM signal without using a guard interval (GI). The features of proposed method is to employ a time domain training sequence (TS) both for the estimation of time domain CIR at every sampling time and for removing the inter-symbol interference (ISI) incurred in the multipath fading channel. The proposed method also employs the TDE with a maximum likelihood (ML) estimation method in the demodulation of received time domain signal at every symbol instead of using the conventional Minimum Mean Square Error-Frequency Domain Equalization (MMSE-FDE) method. This paper presents various simulation results to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed demodulation method for the DFTSOFDM signal without GI as comparing with the conventional MMSE-FDE and TDE methods both of usingGI under highly mobile environments.

This paper introduces novel hybrid pilot-aided channel estimation with decision feedback equalizer(DFE) for OFDM systems and its corresponding hardware co-simulation platform. This pilot-aided channel estimation algorithm consists of two parts: coarse estimation and fine estimation. In the coarse estimation, the combined classical channel estimation methods including carrier frequency offset (CFO) and channel impulse response (CIR) estimation are used. Based on the received training sequence and pilot tones in the frequency domain, the major CFO, sampling clock frequency offset (SFO) and CIR effect coefficients are derived. In the fine estimation, the pilot-aided polynomial interpolation estimation combined with a new decision feedback equalizer scheme based on minimum mean squared error (MMSE) criteria is proposed to reduce the residual effect caused by imperfect CIR equalizer, SFO and CFO. At the same time, for the purpose of speeding up the whole development and verification process, a new architecture of co-simulation platform which combines software and hardware is introduced. The simulation results on the co-simulation platform indicate that the proposed hybrid channel estimation scheme can enhance the receiver performance by 6 dB in terms of error vector magnitude (EVM) over large ranges of CFO and SFO and BER performance by 7 dB for SNR range over 15 dB.

We consider the joint estimation of channel impulse response (CIR) and frequency offset (FO) for a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) frequency selective fading channel. We average the joint likelihood function of the CIR and the FO over the distribution of CIR and maximize the resulting marginal likelihood function to estimate the FO. We also derive the design criteria for the training sequences (TS) which maximize the performance of our proposed estimator. Simulation results show that the optimal TS can improve the performance of the joint ML estimator.

Channel estimation and blind equalization of MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) communications channels is considered using primarily the second-order statistics of the data. We consider estimation of (partial) channel impulse response and design of finite-length MMSE (minimum mean-square error) blind equalizers. The basis of the approach is the design of a zero-forcing equalizer that whitens the noise-free data. We allow infinite impulse response (IIR) channels. Moreover, the multichannel transfer function need not be column-reduced. Our approaches also work when the subchannel transfer functions have common zeros so long as the common zeros are minimum-phase zeros. The channel length or model orders need not be known. The sources are recovered up to a unitary mixing matrix and are further 'unmixed using higher-order statistics of the data. An illustrative simulation example is provided.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication systems require accurate estimation of timing offset and channel impulse response in order to achieve desirable performance. In this paper, we consider the optimal placement of pilot symbols over the OFDM subcarriers in order to minimize a function of the Cramer-Rao bound on these parameters. Previous work has investigated this problem for channel estimation only, and found that equi-spaced, equi-powered pilots are optimal. We show that when the time-delay must be simultaneously estimated, the optimal pilot distribution is often quite different, with more pilot energy distributed to the edges of the signal bandwidth. Upper and lower bounds for the required number of optimal pilots are also presented for the case where the variance on the time-delay estimate is minimized.