Nonselective fading channel estimation with nonuniformly spaced pilot symbols

Recently, there has been great demand for multimedia and data communications in mobile communication systems. In order to enhance voice quality and increase packet data throughput rate for the existing mobile systems and the next generation mobile systems, a number of new standards are being developed. 8-PSK/QPSK modulation has been adopted by most of these standards as one of the modulation schemes, and nonuniformly spaced pilot symbols are employed in slot structures to have successful demodulation. In this paper, an accurate and computationally efficient method is presented for estimating nondispersive channel fading with non-uniformly spaced pilot symbols. By employing a least-squares method with time-variant complex-valued coefficient polynomials, it is proven that nonselective channel fading of each slot can be estimated by the product of a constant matrix and the fading at pilot symbol locations of the slot. The constant matrix is further optimized by least-squares off-line training method provided by this paper. Using the estimated fading process, the fading on the data symbols can be removed by using the estimated amplitude and phase of the fading as the reference, greatly improving the BER. Closed form results for the BER of coherent 8-PSK are included in this paper as well. Simulation results indicate that our method provides BER performance very close to the analytic BER result.