An improved pilot-assisted SNR estimation for MBSFN downlink transmission

Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is a crucial parameter for adaptive transmission in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. For the OFDM-based multicast/broadcast over single frequency network (MBSFN) system, the downlink transmission channels is quite frequency selective, which is a great challenge for SNR estimation in user terminals with simple implementation. We develop a pilotassisted algorithm operated in transform domain to improve estimation performance. The proposed estimation algorithm is robust to frequency and time selectivity, and is suited to different pilot patterns. Simulations show that the proposed estimator is insensitive to different type of channels, and is superior to conventional methods.