A novel FIR channel estimation method for land mobile satellite channel

The communication between the satellites and the terminals on the ground can profit from the significant research achievements in the area of terrestrial MIMO technology. In this paper, a novel linear prediction based FIR channel estimator is proposed to estimate the outdated CSI introduced by the long distance between the on-ground terminals and the satellites effectively. The spatial correlation property and the temporal correlation property of the land mobile satellite channel model are investigated firstly. During the process of the channel estimator design, the MMSE criterion is adopted to ensure its feasibility. After that, the minimum of the estimation error MSE is derived and analyzed. Finally, we use some precoding schemes which utilize the estimated CSI to measure the performance of the estimator. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method can estimate the channel accurately and can help improving on both BER performance and achievable rate by linear precoding.