Low-Complexity Enhanced DFT-based Channel Estimation for OFDM Systems with virtual Subcarriers

Traditional discrete Fourier transform (DFT) based channel estimation will suffer from significant performance degradation due to the edge effect in practical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with virtual subcarriers. In this paper, a novel enhanced DFT-based channel estimation method is proposed, which can effectively mitigate the edge effect caused by virtual subcarriers via edge value repetition in the frequency domain and zero insertion in the time domain, thus to improve the overall channel estimation performance for the usable subcarriers. Moreover, it does not need a priori statistical characteristics of the wireless channel and the complexity of channel estimation is not increased. Therefore, it is especially suitable for hardware implementation.