Uneven comb pilots based channel estimation for CDD-OFDM system

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a promising technique for high speed data transmission over multipath fading channels. In an MIMO-OFDM system, cyclic delay diversity (CDD) serves as a simple and elegant solution to exploit transmit diversity. This paper investigates the uneven comb pilots based channel estimation for CDD-OFDM system with periodical frequency selective channel. Our study reveals that uneven comb pilots outperform their even counterpart in complicated channel conditions, such as adaptive CDD, where cyclic delay parameters may change from time to time. Furthermore, we identify the interpolation as a key problem in uneven-pilot based OFDM system and study several scattered data interpolation algorithms. Simulation results show that radial basis function (RBF) interpolation has the best tradeoff in terms of accuracy and computational complexity.