Pilot-symbol aided coherent M-ary PSK in frequency-selective fast Rayleigh fading channels

Pilot-symbol aided coherent M-ary PSK modems in digital cellular mobile radio systems are analyzed theoretically. The error-floors caused by the Doppler spread in a fast fading channel are removed in both flat and selective fading channels. However, the error-floors caused by the delay spread are lower-bounded by those that exist in the ideal coherent detection. The systems are modeled as frequency-selective fast Rayleigh fading channels, corrupted by co-channel interference (CCI) and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). In the proposed scheme, pilot symbols are inserted periodically to monitor the channel characteristics. The fading processes experienced by the pilot symbols are used to estimate those suffered by the data symbols using interpolation or filtering. The estimated fade characteristics are used to compensate the random phase variation caused by the Doppler spread, so that the signals can be demodulated coherently. The theoretical performances of the fade compensated coherent modems are evaluated. The results show that the fade compensated coherent demodulation with the least redundancy achieves the same performance as the ideal differential detection in a fading channel. The performance approaches that of the ideal coherent demodulation as more redundancy is allowed. The pilot-symbol-insertion (PSI) scheme is also applicable to M-ary QAM modems and Rician channels. The residual frequency offset can also be compensated by the PSI technique