On the Use of a Performance Indicator for Optimal Pilot Positioning in Multicarrier Systems

We have recently proposed a simple performance indicator for discrete multitone systems, which accounts for the channel estimation error, the emitted power and the noise level. It shows a much better correlation with the bit error rate (BER) than the more classical mean square error (MSE) while being of same computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a practical application of this indicator in the context of pilot symbol assisted modulation (PSAM). PSAM consists in a discrete multitone modulation associated with pilot tones which are used for channel estimation. Here, we show that our indicator can be used in order to find pilot optimal positioning. Its main advantage is to avoid BER computation.