Optimum receivers for pilot symbol assisted modulation in Rician fading

Optimum detectors for pilot symbol assisted modulation signals in a Rician fading channel are derived. Conventional pilot symbol assisted modulation (CPSAM) as used on Rayleigh fading channels has been employed on Rician fading channels. It is shown that the intuitive CPSAM structure is suboptimal for Rician fading. The optimum pilot symbol assisted modulation (OPSAM) signal detector uses knowledge of the specular component power and also jointly processes the pilot symbols and the data symbol. The performance of the optimum detector is analyzed and compared with that of the conventional detector. It is concluded that substantial gains can be achieved by exploiting knowledge of the specular component while joint processing of the data symbol with the pilot symbols may offer only small benefits