DMRS based Channel Estimation for 5G PBCH

In wireless communications, signals suffer from fading caused by the channel between the transmitter and the receiver. Channel estimation is required for coherent detection at the receiver, as well as for interference supression and efficient diversity combining. In 5G, physical broadcast channel (PBCH) contains demodulation reference signals (DMRSs) together with PBCH information symbols that carry the master information block (MIB). The receiver performs pilot based channel estimation using the DMRS for coherent detection of the MIB. It is commonly the case that the receiver does not know the transmitted DMRS sequence, in which case the DMRS sequence must be estimated by the receiver. In this work, performance of pilot based channel estimation using PBCH DMRS is investigated by applying linear and Wiener interpolation on least squares (LS) channel estimates and considering the effect of DMRS search success rate.