Sparsity Domain Smoothing Based Thresholding Recovery Method for OFDM Sparse Channel Estimation

Abstract: Due to the ever increasing data rate demand of beyond 5G networks and considering the wide range of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multipllexing (OFDM) technique in cellular systems, it is critical to reduce pilot overhead of OFDM systems in order to increase data rate of such systems. Due to sparsity of multipath channels, sparse recovery methods can be exploited to reduce pilot overhead. OFDM pilots are utilized as random samples for channel impulse response estimation. We propose a three-step sparsity recovery algorithm which is based on sparsity domain smoothing. Time domain residue computation, sparsity domain smoothing, and adaptive thresholding sparsifying are the three-steps of the proposed scheme. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed sparsity domain smoothing based thresholding recovery method known as SDS-IMAT has not been used for OFDM sparse channel estimation in the literature. Pilot locations are also derived based on the minimization of the measurement matrix coherence. Numerical results verify that the performance of the proposed scheme outperforms other existing thresholding and greedy recovery methods and has a near-optimal performance. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is shown in terms of mean square error and bit error rate.