Preamble-Based Channel Estimation for CP-OFDM and OFDM/OQAM Systems: A Comparative Study

Abstract: In this paper, preamble-based least squares (LS) channel estimation in OFDM systems of the QAM and offset QAM (OQAM) types is considered, in both the frequency and the time domains. The construction of optimal (in the mean squared error (MSE) sense) preambles is investigated, for both the cases of full (all tones carrying pilot symbols) and sparse (a subset of pilot tones, surrounded by nulls or data) preambles. The two OFDM systems are compared for the same transmit power, which, for cyclic prefix (CP) based OFDM/QAM, also includes the power spent for CP transmission. OFDM/OQAM, with a sparse preamble consisting of equipowered and equispaced pilots embedded in zeros, turns out to perform at least as well as CP-OFDM. Simulations results are presented that verify the analysis.