CHANNEL TRACKING IN WIRELESS OFDM SYSTEM

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) provides an effective and low complexity means of eliminating inter symbol interference for transmission over frequency selective fading channels. This technique has received a lot of interest in mobile communication research as the radio channel is usually frequency selective and time variant. In OFDM system, modulation may be coherent or differential. Channel state information (CSI) is required for the OFDM receiver to perform coherent detection or diversity combining, if multiple transmit and receive antennas are deployed. In practice, CSI can be reliably estimated at the receiver by transmitting pilots along with data symbols. Pilot symbol assisted channel estimation is especially attractive for wireless links, where the channel is time-varying. When using differential modulation there is no need for a channel estimate but its performance is inferior to coherent system. In this paper we investigate and compare various efficient pilot based channel estimation schemes for OFDM systems. The channel estimation can be performed by either inserting pilot tones into all subcarriers of OFDM symbols with a specific period.