Improved Pilot-Assisted Prediction of Unknown Time-Selective Rayleigh Channels

To enable closed-loop operation of high-mobility systems, reliable channel prediction is needed to prevent the obsolescence of channel information due to feedback and processing delays. In this paper, novel linear pilot symbol-aided techniques are proposed for block-adaptive prediction of flat time-selective Rayleigh fading channels. Unlike many previous investigations, which assume that the fading statistics are known, we focus on practical conditions where prediction must take place over short noisy windows of unknown channels. Significant performance gains are observed when the method is applied, for example, to a selection transmitter diversity system operating in a fast fading environment.