Iterative Channel Estimation for Block Transmission with Known Symbol Padding - A New Look at TDS-OFDM

This study proposes an iterative channel impulse response (CIR) estimation scheme for multicarrier block transmission with known symbol padding, in the context of the time-domain synchronous OFDM (TDS-OFDM) system. It is shown that the TDS-OFDM still fulfils the circular convolution relationship even if pseudo-noise (PN) sequence is used as guard interval. While conventional methods perform the channel estimation based on the cyclic prefix reconstruction or residual intersymbol interference cancellation in the time domain, by processing the data part and the known symbol padding in one TDS-OFDM block separately, the new proposal uses the one- tap frequency-domain equalization to separate the data part and the known symbol padding and the CIR can be estimated in an iterative manner. In a typical example for 3780-point FFT based TDS-OFDM system with 16QAM constellations, the mean square error (MSE) of of the proposed channel estimator can be reduced to about 10^-5/2 after two iterations when the channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is larger than 8 dB, without the initial CIR estimation. The BER performance of a QPSK TDS-OFDM system shows that the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) degradation based on the proposed channel estimator is less than 0.3 dB compared with the lower bound for both Brazil A and B channels.