Pilot Design for Sparse Channel Estimation in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Systems

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a well-known technique used in modern wide band wireless communication systems. Coherent OFDM systems achieve its advantages over a multipath fading channel, if channel impulse response is estimated precisely at the receiver. Pilot-aided channel estimation in wide band OFDM systems adopts the recently explored compressive sensing technique to decrease the transmission overhead of pilot subcarriers, since it exploits the inherent sparsity of the wireless fading channel. The accuracy of compressive sensing techniques in sparse channel estimation is based on the location of pilots among OFDM subcarriers. A sufficient condition for the optimal pilot selection from Sylow subgroups is derived. A Sylow subgroup does not exist for most practical OFDM systems. Therefore, a deterministic pilot search algorithm is described to select pilot locations based on minimizing coherence, along with minimum variance. Simulation results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in terms of bit error rate, compared to the existing solutions.