Performance analysis of pilot symbol arrangement for OFDM system under time-varying multi-path Rayleigh fading channels

In this paper, we investigate the performance of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system based on a configuration of pilot symbol arrangement under a time-varying fading channel and verify it by simulation. A I,articular channel of concern is modeled by a wide-sense stationary uncorrelated scattering (WSSUS) Rayleigh fading process and furthermore, the inter-carrier interference (ICI) caused by the fading process is assumed to be Gaussian noise. The current analysis focuses on the performance limit of the pilot symbol-assisted channel estimation, in which a minimum mean squared error (MMSE) channel estimator is employed to exploit both time- and frequency-domain correlation simultaneously. In particular. the optimum pilot symbol arrangement was investigated for the time-varying fading channel, which has been rarely addressed with any analytical approach in previous research. Although the proposed channel estimation scheme is subject to the intrusive processing complexity in the receiver, it has been shown that the better BER performance can be achieved as compared with that of the differential detection scheme and the error floor can be removed.