A novel effective channel estimation scheme applicable to IEEE 802.11p

In vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, reliable channel estimation is critical in the successful application of equalization and demodulation due to the extremely time-varying characteristic of V2V channels. Therefore, a great deal of channel estimation schemes have been proposed, e.g., by adding postamble, inserting midambles, and turning the phase tracking pilots into channel estimation pilots. However, most of them necessitate a modification of either the packet structure or the basic function of pilots, resulting in an incompatibility with the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based IEEE 802.11p standard. Motivated by this, in this paper, we present a novel effective channel estimation scheme without the aforementioned modification. In specific, in the proposed scheme, we first utilize the data symbols to construct pilots and then exploit the correlated characteristic between channels within two adjacent symbols to improve the accuracy of the channel estimates. Analysis and simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme outperforms all current ones especially in high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime.