Robust Channel Estimation For OFDM Systems With Rapid Dispersive Fading Channels
Robust Channel Estimation For OFDM Systems With Rapid Dispersive Fading Channels
Robust Channel Estimation For OFDM Systems With Rapid Dispersive Fading Channels
7, JULY 1998
AbstractOrthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) has been proposed based on the singular-value decomposition
modulation is a promising technique for achieving the high or frequency-domain filtering. Time-domain filtering has been
bit rates required for a wireless multimedia service. Without proposed in [8] to further improve the channel estimator
channel estimation and tracking, OFDM systems have to use
differential phase-shift keying (DPSK), which has a 3-dB signal- performance. However, the best time- or frequency-domain
to-noise ratio (SNR) loss compared with coherent phase-shift filtering shapes for channel estimation has not been studied.
keying (PSK). To improve the performance of OFDM systems In this paper we investigate minimum mean-square-error
by using coherent PSK, we investigate robust channel estimation (MMSE) channel estimation for OFDM systems. We first
for OFDM systems. We derive a minimum mean-square-error derive the MMSE estimator, which makes full use of the
(MMSE) channel estimator, which makes full use of the time-
and frequency-domain correlations of the frequency response correlation of the channel frequency response at different times
of time-varying dispersive fading channels. Since the channel and frequencies. In particular, for mobile wireless channels, the
statistics are usually unknown, we also analyze the mismatch of correlation of the channel frequency response at different times
the estimator-to-channel statistics and propose a robust channel and frequencies can be separated into the multiplication of the
estimator that is insensitive to the channel statistics. The robust time- and frequency-domain correlation functions. Hence, our
channel estimator can significantly improve the performance of
OFDM systems in a rapid dispersive fading channel. MMSE channel estimator can be a frequency-domain filter
using the fast Fourier transform (FFT), followed by time-
Index Terms Diversity combining, orthogonal frequency- domain filters. Since the channel statistics, which depend on
division multiplexing, robust channel estimation, time-varying
dispersive fading. the particular environment, are usually unknown, we present a
robust estimator, that is, an estimator that is not sensitive to the
channel statistics. Computer simulation demonstrates that the
I. INTRODUCTION performance of OFDM systems using coherent demodulation
based on our channel estimator can be significantly improved.
M ULTIMEDIA wireless services require high-bit-rate
transmission over mobile radio channels. To reduce
the effect of intersymbol interference (ISI) caused by the
The paper is organized as follows. Section II introduces the
statistics of the mobile wireless channel and briefly describes
dispersive Rayleigh-fading environment [1], the symbol du- the OFDM system with channel estimation. Then, Section III
ration must be much larger than the channel delay spread. In derives the basic MMSE channel estimator for the OFDM
orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) [2][9], systems. Next, Section IV presents a robust channel estima-
the entire channel is divided into many narrow subchannels, tor design approach. Finally, Section V presents computer
which are transmitted in parallel, thereby increasing the sym- simulation results to demonstrate the effectiveness of this
bol duration and reducing the ISI. Therefore, OFDM is an channel estimator for OFDM systems in rapid dispersive
effective technique for combating multipath fading and for fading channels.
high-bit-rate transmission over mobile wireless channels.
To eliminate the need for channel estimation and tracking, II. CHANNEL STATISTICS AND OFDM SYSTEMS
differential demodulation can be used in OFDM systems, at Before investigating channel estimation for OFDM systems
the expense of a 34-dB loss in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in mobile radio channels, we briefly describe the channel sta-
compared with coherent demodulation. Accurate channel esti- tistics, emphasizing the separation property of mobile wireless
mation [5], [6], [8] can be used in OFDM systems to improve channels, which is crucial for simplifying our MMSE channel
their performance by allowing for coherent demodulation. estimator. In this section we also briefly describe an OFDM
Furthermore, for systems with receiver diversity, optimum system with receiver diversity.
combining can be obtained by means of channel estimators.
In [5], [6], and [8], a channel estimator for OFDM systems A. Statistics of Mobile Radio Channels
Paper approved by N. C. Beaulieu, the Editor for Wireless Communication The complex baseband representation [10] of a mobile
Theory of the IEEE Communications Society. Manuscript received August wireless channel impulse response can be described by
20, 1997; revised March 16, 1998. This paper was presented in part at IEEE
ICC98, Atlanta, GA, June 1998. (1)
The authors are with the Wireless Systems Research Department,
AT&T LabsResearch, Red Bank, NJ 07701-7033 USA (e-mail:
liye@research.att.com; ljc@research.att.com; nelson@research.att.com). where is the delay of the th path and is the
Publisher Item Identifier S 0090-6778(98)05169-1. corresponding complex amplitude. Due to the motion of the
00906778/98$10.00 1998 IEEE
LI et al.: ROBUST CHANNEL ESTIMATION FOR OFDM SYSTEMS 903
(2)
where is the average power of the th path.
Using (1), the frequency response of the time-varying radio
channel at time is (b)
Fig. 1. OFDM system with channel estimator. (a) Transmitter. (b) Diversity
receiver.
(3)
kind, and its Fourier transform (FT) is
Hence, the correlation function of the frequency response for
different times and frequencies is if
(10)
otherwise
In the above expression , and is the Doppler
frequency, which is related to the vehicle speed and the
carrier frequency by
(11)
(4) where is the speed of light. For example, for a system with
carrier frequency GHz, Hz when the user
where is the total average power of the channel impulse is moving at 60 mi/h.
response defined as
B. OFDM Systems with Channel Estimator
(5) The OFDM system with channel estimation considered in
this paper is shown in Fig. 1. The ReedSolomon (RS) code
(6) across tones is utilized in the system to correct the burst errors
resulting from frequency-selective fading. Since the phase of
each subchannel can be obtained by the channel estimator,
It is obvious that Without loss of
coherent phase-shift keying (PSK) modulation is used here to
generality, we also assume that , which, therefore, enhance the system performance.
can be omitted from (4). For a diversity receiver, the signal from the th antenna at
From (4), the correlation function of can be sep- the th tone and the th block can be expressed as
arated into the multiplication of a time-domain correlation (12)
and a frequency-domain correlation is
In the above expression is additive Gaussian noise
dependent on the vehicle speed or, equivalently, the Doppler
from the th antenna at the th tone and the th block, with
frequency, while depends on the multipath delay zero-mean and variance We also assume is inde-
spread. With the separation property, we are able to simplify pendent for different s, s, or s. , the frequency
our MMSE channel estimator described in the next section. response at the th tone and the th block corresponding to
For an OFDM system with block length and tone spacing the th antenna, is assumed independent for different s,
(subchannel spacing) , the correlation function for different but with the same statistics. is the signal modulating
blocks and tones can be written as the th tone during the th block and is assumed to have unit
variance and be independent for different s and s.
(7) With knowledge of the channel parameters, can be
where estimated as by an MMSE combiner
(8)
From Jakes model [11] (13)
(9)
where is the zeroth-order Bessel function of the first However, the multipath channel parameters are time varying
904 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 46, NO. 7, JULY 1998
(19)
(20)
(26)
In the above expression is a diagonal matrix with the
th diagonal element For Jakes model, Then by direct calcu-
lation
(21)
(27)
where is a stable one-sided FT
(22)
(28)
LI et al.: ROBUST CHANNEL ESTIMATION FOR OFDM SYSTEMS 905
A. Mismatch Analysis
If an MMSE channel estimator is designed to match a
(33) channel with time- and frequency-domain correlations
and , respectively, then its coefficients are
determined from (20) by
For any -band-limited function satisfying (37)
(35)
(38)
where and
if
(36) (39)
otherwise.
The above inequality suggests that a channel with an ideal Substituting (37) into (38), we obtain a general formula for
906 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 46, NO. 7, JULY 1998
the MSE of the mismatched channel estimator If , that is, the time-domain correlation of
the designed estimator is ideal -band-limited, then, for any
channels with zero outside and
(45)
we have
(46)
(40) Therefore
or (48)
.. ..
. .
(43)
(49)
The first term in the above expression represents the MSE
variation due to the mismatch. By means of (24) and (21), The leakage of the above approximation depends on the guard
can be further simplified into interval and the channel multipath delay profile. If the delay
of a path is an integer multiple of the sampling interval ,
that is, , then all of the energy from the path will be
mapped to Otherwise, if the delay is a noninteger multiple
of the sampling interval, that is, , then most
of its energy will be contained in and , although the
energy will leak to all s. Hence, if the maximum delay
spread is , then for all ,
(44) where is the symbol duration of OFDM.
LI et al.: ROBUST CHANNEL ESTIMATION FOR OFDM SYSTEMS 907
(57)
(58)
(51)
In the above derivation we have used (23) and (21). From its
definition, and for any
If the channel estimator is designed such that
for (59)
(52)
for
If the channel estimator is designed to match the Doppler
then, for any channel with for and
spectrum given by (10) and the s given by (52), then
, we have
then
(55)
since for any
From the above discussion, a robust estimator, which is
insensitive to the channel statistics, should have an ideal
band-limited time-domain correlation (62)
and a frequency-domain correlation matrix
Hence, compared with the estimator that tightly matches the
.. .. .. Doppler spectrum, the performance degradation of the robust
. . . (56) channel estimator is negligible.
(66)
for where
if
(67)
otherwise.
From (66), it is obvious that for For
(68)
where
(a)
(69)
..
.
.. .. .. ..
. . . .
..
.
(70)
(71)
Using derivations similar to those in Section III, the FT of
the coefficient matrix of the designed FIR channel estimator
is determined by
(72)
(b)
where is a diagonal matrix with
Fig. 3. Normalized MSE of channel estimator versus Doppler frequency
(a) when SNR = 10 dB and td = 0, 5, 10, 20, and 40s and (b) when (73)
SNR = 10 dB and fd td = 0:000 08, 0:0008, and 0:008, respectively.
(a) (b)
(c) (d)
Fig. 4. Normalized MSE versus the length of FIR channel estimator under different channel conditions.
A. System Parameters erases ten symbols, based on signal strength, and corrects five
In our simulation, we use a two-path Rayleigh-fading chan- additional random errors. Hence, the simulated system can
nel model [12] with delay from 0 to 40 s and Doppler transmit data at 1.2 Mb/s before decoding or 600 kb/s after
decoding, over an 800-kHz channel.
frequency from 10 to 200 Hz. The channels corresponding
to different receivers have the same statistics. Two antennas
are used for receiver diversity. B. Reference Generation
To construct an OFDM signal, assume that the entire An ideal reference is assumed in the derivation of the chan-
channel bandwidth, 800 kHz, is divided into 128 subchannels. nel estimator in Section III. In practical systems a reference can
The four subchannels on each end are used as guard tones and be generated during a training block. In subsequent blocks a
the rest (120 tones) are used to transmit data. To make the tones reference is generated using the received signals. We consider
orthogonal to each other, the symbol duration is 160 s. An four possible reference generating schemes.
additional 40- s guard interval is used to provide protection 1) Undecoded/Decoded Dual Mode Reference: If the RS
from ISI due to channel multipath delay spread. This results decoder can successfully correct all errors in an OFDM
in a total block length s and a subchannel symbol block, the reference for the block can be generated by
rate kBd. the decoded data; hence Otherwise,
To compare the performance of the OFDM system with and
without the channel estimation, PSK modulation with coherent 2) Undecoded Reference: , no matter
demodulation and differential PSK (DPSK) modulation with whether the RS decoder can successfully correct all
differential demodulation are used, respectively. As in [4], a errors in a block or not.
(40,20) RS code, with each code symbol consisting of three 3) Decoded/CMA Dual Mode Reference: The constant
quadrature PSK/differential quadrature PSK (QPSK/DQPSK) modulus algorithm (CMA) is one of the most effective
symbols grouped in frequency, is used in the system. Hence, adaptive blind equalization algorithms [13], [14]. It
each OFDM block forms an RS codeword. The RS decoder can be also used to generate a reference for the
910 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 46, NO. 7, JULY 1998
(a) (a)
(b) (b)
Fig. 5. (a) WER and (b) NMSE of robust estimator with different references Fig. 6. (a) WER and (b) NMSE of robust estimator with different references
versus SNR for the system without training blocks when the 50-tap channel versus SNR for the system with 1% training blocks when the 50-tap channel
estimator matches the channel with fd = 40 Hz and td = 20 s. estimator matches the channel with fd = 40 Hz and td = 20 s.
OFDM channel estimator. If the RS decoder can Fig. 5 shows the word-error rate (WER) and normalized
successfully correct all errors in a block, the reference MSE (NMSE) for the OFDM system with only the first block
for the block can be generated from the decoded data; as a training or synchronizing block and for a channel with
hence Otherwise, the reference can Hz and s. From the figure, when
use the projection of on the unit circle, i.e., dB, the channel estimator using the decoded/undecoded dual
mode reference or the undecoded reference can estimate the
4) Error Removal Reference: If the RS decoder can suc- channel parameters with NMSE as small as 22 dB. Hence,
cessfully correct all errors in a block, the reference the WER of the system is almost the same as the performance
for the block can be generated by the decoded data. assuming ideal knowledge of the channel parameters, which is
Otherwise, the s are used instead of s about 3 dB better than using differential detection. However,
for , respectively. due to error propagation through the references, there is a noise
threshold for the channel estimator. For the estimators with the
decoded/undecoded dual mode reference and the undecoded
C. Simulation Results reference, the noise thresholds are 7 and 8 dB, respectively.
Figs. 58 demonstrate the performance of the channel es- For the estimators using the other two reference schemes, the
timator using different references under different channel noise thresholds are 12 and 19 dB, respectively. Once the SNR
conditions. To get insight into the average behavior of the is larger than the noise threshold, the system performance will
channel estimator, we have averaged the performance over be significantly better than that of the OFDM system using
10 000 OFDM blocks. DQPSK.
LI et al.: ROBUST CHANNEL ESTIMATION FOR OFDM SYSTEMS 911
(a) (a)
(b) (b)
Fig. 7. (a) WER and (b) NMSE of robust estimator with different references Fig. 8. (a) WER and (b) NMSE of robust estimator with different references
versus SNR for the system with 1% training blocks when the 50-tap channel versus SNR for the system with 10% training blocks when the five-tap channel
estimator matches the channel with fd = 200 Hz and td = 5 s. estimator matches the channel with fd = 200 Hz and td = 5 s.
To suppress the error propagation, training blocks are pe- spread, then for all channels with Hz and s,
riodically inserted in the data stream. Fig. 6 illustrates the the system performance is not worse than the channel with
WER and NMSE for the systems with 1% training blocks. Hz and s, as indicated by Fig. 9. However,
In this situation the noise threshold disappears and, hence, the for channels with Hz or s, such as
OFDM system with channel estimation has better performance Hz and s or Hz and s, the
than the one without channel estimation when the SNR ranges system performance degrades dramatically. On the other hand,
from 0 to 20 dB. as indicated in Fig. 10, if the estimator is designed to match a
For a channel with a Doppler frequency as large as 200 Hz, Doppler frequency or delay spread larger than the actual ones,
as indicated in Fig. 7, if 1% training blocks are used, then the system performance degrades only slightly compared with
the OFDM system with channel estimation has about a 1.5- estimation that exactly matches the channel Doppler frequency
dB SNR improvement compared to the one without channel and delay spread.
estimation. If the training blocks are increased from 1% to
10% of the data, then the required SNR for
is reduced by 1 dB compared with the one with 1% training VI. CONCLUSIONS
blocks, but the required SNR for is almost the We have presented the design of robust channel estimators
same as before, as shown in Fig. 8. for OFDM systems that make full use of the time- and
Figs. 9 and 10 illustrate the robustness of our channel frequency-correlations of the rapid dispersive fading wireless
estimator. As indicated in the analysis in Section IV, if a channel and are insensitive to the channel statistics. Com-
channel estimator is designed to match the channel with 40- puter simulation demonstrates that channel estimation gives
Hz maximum Doppler frequency and 20- s maximum delay about 2.5-dB improvement when the Doppler frequency is
912 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 46, NO. 7, JULY 1998
(a) (a)
(b) (b)
Fig. 9. (a) WER and (b) NMSE of the 50-tap channel estimator matching Fig. 10. (a) WER and (b) NMSE of the 50-tap channel estimator matching
fd = 40 Hz and td = 20 s for channels with different fd s and td s. different fd s and td s for the channel with fd = 10 Hz and td = 5 s.
(A.1) (A.3)
Direct calculation shows that (A.1) is equivalent to
With the separation property (7) of the correlation of the
channel frequency response, (A.2) can be simplified to
(A.4)
LI et al.: ROBUST CHANNEL ESTIMATION FOR OFDM SYSTEMS 913
Let then
..
.
(A.14)
..
.
or
..
.
(A.5)
.. (A.15)
.
for , where and are the th
(A.6) elements of and , respectively.
For the with , from [16, Appendix A]
Then, (A.4) can be written in vector form as
(A.16)
(A.7)
(A.8) (A.17)
(A.11)
(A.20)
The in the above expression is the pseudoinverse of ,
which is also a diagonal matrix with elements where is a diagonal matrix with the th diagonal element
if
(A.12) (A.21)
if
(A.13) (A.22)
914 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 46, NO. 7, JULY 1998
then ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank J. Chuang and V. Tarokh for
their insightful comments, and J. Winters and L. Ariyavisitakul
(A.23) for helpful discussions.
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