Design of pilot signal for MC-CDMA uplink systems

Coherent demodulation needs to maintain the symbol timing synchronization and to estimate the channel response in multicarrier code division multiple access systems. The use of inverse DFT (IDFT) is often considered to generate a pilot signal for this propose. However it requires a large implementation complexity, making it impractical for real applications. In this paper, we consider the design of a novel pilot signal for both symbol synchronization and channel estimation. By controlling the design parameters, the pilot signal can be generated to provide a desired signal-to- interference noise power ratio, while maintaining an acceptable peak-to-average power ratio. Simulation results show that the use of the proposed pilot signal can improve the detection performance compared to the use of conventional IDFT-based pilot signal, while significantly reducing the implementation complexity.