Doppler Spread Estimation for an OFDM System with a Rayleigh Fading Channel

A novel Doppler spread estimation scheme is proposed for an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system with a Rayleigh fading channel. The proposal develops a composite power spectral density (PSD) function by averaging the multiple PSD functions computed with multiple sets of the channel frequency response (CFR) coefficients. The Doppler spread is estimated by finding the maximum location of the composite PSD quantities larger than a threshold value given by a fixed fraction of the maximum composite PSD quantity. It is shown by simulation that the proposed scheme performs better than three conventional Doppler spread estimation schemes not only in isotropic scattering environments, but also in nonisotropic scattering environments. Moreover, the proposed scheme is shown to perform well in some Rician channel environments if the Rician K-factor is small.