A new interpolation method for channel estimation of OFDM systems

Pilot-aided channel estimation of OFDM systems mostly needs an interpolation technique to estimate the channel response on non-piloted subcarriers. Many studies about interpolation have been published; however, the performance of which is limited by either the number or the position of pilot subcarriers, such as cubic spline interpolation and DFT-based method. We propose a new interpolation method derived from singular value decomposition (SVD). This method can effectively mitigate the influences from the limitations mentioned above. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the cubic spline one under non-equidistant pilot pattern, in which DFT-based method could not work.