What is Channel Estimation

The wireless radio channel can be parameterised as a combination of paths, each

characterized by a delay and complex amplitude. The signal gets distorted or
various noises are added to the signal while the signal goes through the channel. To
properly decode the received signal without much errors or to remove the distortion
and noise applied by the channel from the received signal. To do this, the first step
is to figure out the characteristics of the channel that the signal has gone through.
The technique/process to characterize the channel is called 'channel estimation'. The
channels in mobile radio systems are usually multipath fading channels, which are
causing inter-symbol interference (ISI) in the received signal. To remove ISI from
the signal, different kind of equalizers can be used. Detection algorithms based on
trellis search (like MLSE or LMS) offer a good receiver performance, but still often
not too much computation. Therefore, these algorithms are currently quite popular.
However, these detectors require knowledge on the channel impulse response
(CIR), which can be provided by a separate channel estimator. Usually the channel
estimation is based on the known sequence of bits, which is unique for a certain
transmitter and which is repeated in every transmission burst. Thus, the channel
estimator is able to estimate CIR for each burst separately by exploiting the known
transmitted bits and the corresponding received samples. The channel effects like a
filter. The filtering nature of the channel is caused by the summation of amplitudes
and delays of the multiple arriving waves at any instant of time.Channel estimation
is to estimate the filter coefficient through received signal and other known
information (such as modulation type).

Fading and Multipath fading effects

The term fading, or, small-scale fading, means rapid fluctuations of the amplitudes,
phases, or multipath delays of a radio signal over a short period or short travel
distance. This might be so severe that large scale radio propagation loss effects
might be ignored.
In principle, the following are the main multipath effects:
Rapid changes in signal strength over a small travel distance or time interval.
Random frequency modulation due to varying Doppler shifts on different
multipath signals.
Time dispersion or echoes caused by multipath propagation delays.
The following physical factors influence small-scale fading in the radio propagation
channel:
Multipath propagation Multipath is the propagation phenomenon that
results in radio signals reaching the receiving antenna by two or more paths.
The effects of multipath include constructive and destructive interference, and
phase shifting of the signal.
Speed of the mobile The relative motion between the base station and the
mobile results in random frequency modulation due to different doppler shifts
on each of the multipath components.
Speed of surrounding objects If objects in the radio channel are in motion,
they induce a time varying Doppler shift on multipath components. If the
surrounding objects move at a greater rate than the mobile, then this effect
dominates fading.
Transmission Bandwidth of the signal If the transmitted radio signal
bandwidth is greater than the bandwidth of the multipath channel (quantified by coherence bandwidth), the received signal will be distorted.
Thus we see that unlike the normal wired communication the impulse response or
the characteristics of the channel in case of wireless communication changes due to
above mentioned factors and hence there arise the need to model and estimate the
wireless radio channel.

What is Multi Carrier Modulation/System

Multi-carrier modulation (MCM) is a method of transmitting data by splitting it into
several components, and sending each of these components over separate carrier
signals. The individual carriers have narrow bandwidth, but the composite signal
can have broad bandwidth. When the overall transmission is received, the receiver
has to then re-assemble the overall data stream from those received on the
individual carriers.
There are many forms of multicarrier modulation techniques that are in use of being
investigated for future use. Some of the more widely known schemes are
summarised below.
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, OFDM: OFDM is possibly
the most widely used form of multicarrier modulation. It uses multiple closely
spaced carriers and as a result of their orthogonality, mutual interference
between them is avoided.
Generalised Frequency Division Multiplexing, GFDM: GFDM is a
multicarrier modulation scheme that uses closed spaced non-orthogonal
carriers and provides flexible pulse shaping. It is therefore attractive for
various applications such as machine to machine communications.
Filter Bank Multi Carrier, FBMC: FBMC is a form of multicarrier
modulation scheme that uses a specialised pulse shaping filter known as an
isotropic orthogonal transform algorithm, IOTA within the digital signal
processing for the system. This scheme provides good time and frequency
localisation properties and this ensures that inter-symbol interference and
inter-carrier interference are avoided without the use of cyclic prefix required
for OFDM based systems.
The advantages of MCM include relative immunity to fading caused by
transmission over more than one path at a time (multipath fading), less
susceptibility than single-carrier systems to interference caused by impulse noise,
and enhanced immunity to inter-symbol interference. Limitations include difficulty
in synchronizing the carriers under marginal conditions, and a relatively strict
requirement that amplification be linear.

Standard Multi-Carrier Transmitter

g(t): Raised Cosine Pulse

Description:- In the transmitter path, binary input data is first sent to a serial-toparallel buffer. Then the data is mapped using different modulating schemes and
then the parallel binary bits can be modulated onto subcarriers. In an MCM based
communication system, the modulated carriers are summed for transmission, and
must be separated in the receiver before demodulation.

Standard Multi-Carrier Receiver

Descritption:- The multi-carrier receiver used is a coherent receiver at different

frequencies. The receiver has to estimate frequency offset and symbol timing.

MCM Orthogonality
Subcarriers at f0 +i/Tn and f0+j/Tn are orthogonal.

Drawbacks of Multi-Carrier Modulation

Requires N modulators and N demodulators which leads to difficult hardware
implementation
Sharp BPF at the receiver not practical which leads to intercarrier interference.
Sub-channel Bandwidths are larger

Solution
The solution is to use overlapping signals and Fourier Transforms which forms the
basis for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. Using the Nyquist criteria
the signals can be assumed to be sampled at B rates per second at the transmitter
where B is the double sided available bandwidth and also twice the maximum
frequency satisfying the Nyquist Criteria. Hence this gives a resemblance to an
expression similar to that of an Inverse Fourier transform. Thus instead of using N
modulators and N demodulators we can use IDFT at the transmitter for mapping the
split data symbol in to different frequency sub-carriers and DFT at the receiver for
demodulating from sub-carriers and then summing up the split data in to one once
again.

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing

The basic idea underlying OFDM systems is the division of the available frequency
spectrum into several subcarriers. To obtain a high spectral efficiency, the frequency
responses of the subcarriers are overlapping and orthogonal, hence the name
OFDM. This orthogonality can be completely maintained with a small price in a
loss in SNR, even though the signal passes through a time dispersive fading
channel, by introducing a cyclic prefix (CP).

OFDM Transmitter

The binary information is first grouped, coded, and mapped according to the
modulation in a signal mapper. After the guard band is inserted, an N-point
inverse discrete-time Fourier transform (IDFTN) block transforms the data
sequence into time domain (note that N is typically 256 or larger). Following the
IDFT block, a cyclic extension of time length TG, chosen to be larger than the
expected delay spread, is inserted to avoid intersymbol and intercarrier
interferences. The D/A converter contains low-pass filters with bandwidth 1/TS,
where TS is the sampling interval. The channel is modeled as an impulse response
g(t) followed by the complex additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) n(t), where
m is a complex values and 0 mTS TG.

OFDM Receiver

At the receiver, after passing through the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and
removing the CP, the DFTN is used to transform the data back to frequency domain.
Lastly, the binary information data is obtained back after the demodulation and
channel decoding.Let X=[Xk]T and Y=[Yk]T (k=0,1,.. N-1)denote the input data of
IDFT block at the transmitter and the output data of DFT block at the receiver,
respectively. Let g=[gn]T and n=[nn]T denote the sampled channel impulse response
and AWGN, respectively. Define the input matrix X=diag(X)and the DFT-matrix

Multipath Induced ISI in OFDM

The last few bits of the previous data symbol interferes with the starting bits of next
data symbol. In order to remove this interference we use Cylic Prefix technique.

ISI Removal The Cyclic Prefix

The Cyclic Prefix (CP) is a block of symbols added at the beginning of each
data block
CP converts a linear convolution channel into a circular convolution channel.
It helps to remove the ISI.
Drawbacks of CP are a reduction in data rate due to the CP overhead and
waste of power in the cyclic prefix samples. The latter can be avoided by
transmitting all zeros (no power).

At the receiver data blocks of length N: y[0],y[1]..y[N-1] are unaffected by

ISI.

n<=N-1 has length N+but samples are redundant. Prefix transmission

results in overhead of N samples and data rate reduction of N+ .Power
in prefix is wasted. Prefix may consist of all zeros symbol with no power
transmitted.

Channel Estimation for OFDM

The two basic 1D channel estimations in OFDM systems are: Block Type Channel Estimation : This is developed under the assumption
of slow fading channel, and it is performed by inserting pilot tones into all
subcarriers of OFDM symbols within a specific period.

Frequency

Time
Block Type Channel estimation

Comb-Type Channel Estimation : This type of channel Estimation is

introduced to satisfy the need for equalizing when the channel changes even
from one OFDM block to the subsequent one. It is thus performed by inserting
pilot tones into certain subcarriers of each OFDM symbol, where the
interpolation is needed to estimate the conditions of data subcarriers.

Frequency

Time
Comb- Type Channel estimation

Block Channel Estimation:In block-type pilot-based channel estimation, OFDM channel estimation symbols
are transmitted periodically, and all subcarriers are used as pilots. The task here is to
estimate the channel conditions (specified) given the pilot signals (specified by
matrix or vector) and received signals (specified ), with or without using certain
knowledge of the channel statistics. The receiver uses the estimated channel
conditions to decode the received data inside the block until the next pilot symbol
arrives. The estimation can be based on least square (LS), minimum mean-square
error (MMSE), and modified MMSE.
In a narrowband flat-fading channel with multiple transmit and receive antennas
(MIMO), the system is modelled as
where y and x are the receive and transmit vectors, respectively, and H and n are
the channel matrix and the noise vector, respectively. The noise is often modelled
as circular symmetric complex normal where the mean value is zero and the noise
covariance matrix S is known.
Let the training sequence be denoted
over the channel as
By combining the received training signals
signalling becomes

, where the vector

for

is transmitted

, the total training

With the training matrix P={P1Pn} and the noise matrix N={N1Nn}
With this notation, channel estimation means that
knowledge of Y and P.

should be recovered from the

Least-Square Estimation
If the channel and noise distributions are unknown, then the leastsquare estimator (also known as the minimum-variance unbiased estimator) is
where
denotes the conjugate transpose. The
estimation Mean Square Error (MSE) is proportional to tr(PPH)-1

where tr denotes the trace. The error is minimized when

is a
scaled identity matrix. This can only be achieved when is equal to (or larger
than) the number of transmit antennas. The simplest example of an optimal
training matrix is to select P as a (scaled) identity matrix of the same size that
the number of transmit antennas.
MMSE Estimation The MMSE estimator employs the second-order
statistics of the channel conditions to minimize the mean-square error.

Other Channel Estimation Techniques are:

Blind (without pilots)
Based on channel statistics employment rather than on that of pilots.
No Training sequences required
Most existing blind channel estimation methods are based on second- or
higher order statistics. It features relatively low complexity and a very fast
convergence rate.
Hard to implement on real time systems.
Semi-Blind (with initial pilot-based channel estimation and next channel
tracking)
Assumes an intermediate position and relies partly on pilots and partly on the
use of channel statistics.
A semi-blind competitive neural network based method of time-varying
channel estimation is tested in this work.

Conclusion

In OFDM systems, efficient channel estimation schemes are essential for coherent
detection of a received signal. After multi-carrier demodulation, the received signal
is typically correlated in two dimensions, in time and frequency. By periodically
inserting pilots in the time-frequency grid to satisfy the 2D sampling theorem, the
channel response can be reconstructed by exploiting its correlation in time and
frequency.
This report fully reviews channel estimation strategies in OFDM systems. It
describes block-type pilot-channel estimators, which may be based on least square
(LS), minimum mean-square error (MMSE). It also analyzes the comb-type pilot
channel estimators, which can be an LS estimator with certain 1D interpolation.
Other channel estimators are introduced such as Blind which is based on channel
statistics employment rather then pilot carrier.

References:
Sinem Coleri, Mustafa Ergen, Anuj Puri, and Ahmad Bahai, Channel
Estimation Techniques Based on Pilot Arrangement in OFDM Systems IEEE
Transactions on broadcasting, vol. 48, NO. 3 Sep-2002.
Edfors, O., Sandell, M., Van de Beek, J.-J., Landstrm, D., and Sjberg, F., An
Introduction to Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing, Lule, Sweden:
Lule Tekniska Universitet, 1996, pp. 158.
S. Liang and W. Wu, Channel Estimation Based on Pilot Subcarrier in SpaceTime Block Coded OFDM System, Proc. IEEE Intl. Conf. Commun.
Technol., vol. 2, Beijing, China, Apr. 2003, pp. 911
NPTEL Tutorials on 4G wirelesss Communication Systems and OFDM
Freescale Documentation on OFDM

Index
Introduction to Channel Estimation
Standard Multi Carrier System
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
Block and Comb Channel Estimation Techniques
Blind and Semi-Blind Channel Estimation Techniques
Conclusion