Pilot Pattern Design for Two-Dimensional OFDM Modulations in Time-Varying Frequency-Selective Fading Channels

Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulations are robust to time-varying frequency-selective fading channels. OTFS modulations operate in the delay-Doppler domain whereas two-dimensional (2D) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulations operate in the time-frequency domain. For 2D OFDM modulations in time-varying frequency-selective fading channels, we investigate the pilot pattern design problem, which minimizes the mean square error (MSE) of channel estimation. The MSE lower bound (LB) is theoretically derived to provide the design criterion. Based on the criterion, we show that the LB achieving design can be found by exhaustive 2D pilot location search. Exhaustive 2D search has high computational complexity. To reduce the complexity, sufficient conditions on the existence of LB achieving design are provided to decouple the 2D problem into two one-dimensional (1D) problems. For the 1D problem, we propose the LB achieving design when the number of possible pilot locations is divisible by the number of pilots. Simulation results illustrate that our proposed LB achieving design is superior to the random pilot pattern design and the bilinear interpolation channel estimation method.