Analysis of pilot-assisted channel estimators for OFDM systems with transmit diversity

In this paper, we analyze the performance of pilot-assisted least square (LS) and minimum mean squared error (MMSE) channel estimators for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with transmit antenna diversity. We first provide a design of orthogonal pilot sequences to simplify the estimators. We then analyze the mean squared error (MSE) performance, and study the leakage effect. When a channel tap is not sample-spaced, our analysis shows that the power of the channel tap will leak to not only other taps of the same antenna, but also taps belonging to other antennas. The leakage across antennas is mainly determined by the phase separation between pilot sequences, which is further related to the ratio between the number of pilots and number of antennas. We demonstrate that the MSE performance can be improved if more pilots are used, or fewer channels are estimated simultaneously.