Estimation of time-varying digital radio channels

In the design of block-oriented digital communication systems that must operate over time-dispersive channels, it is usually assumed that the channel is constant over the duration of a data block, even if the channel fades. The authors study the degradation in receiver performance caused by actual interblock channel variation. For tractability, attention is restricted to the case in which the channel variations are not tracked using decision-directed adaptation. The results suggest that unless the system parameters are carefully chosen, the constant-channel assumption is far from accurate. The quantitative results also offer a measure of the rate of channel time-variations, and give guidelines for deciding when those variations can be considered slow. These guidelines can be used as first-order evaluators of important system design decisions, such as total block size, training overhead, and data rate, for particular channel conditions